The 27th amendment is our most recent amendment, ratified in 1992. It reads:

“No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

In short, a sitting Congress can’t change its pay while it is in session for two years. But it can give the next Congress a raise.

It’s not a new idea. The amendment was proposed back in 1789 by James Madison along with other amendments that became the Bill of Rights, but it took 203 years for it to become the law of the land.

Since then, the 27th Amendment had gotten very little publicity until the past few months, with support emerging on all sides—for congressional pay delays, cuts, or even raises.

In January, the issue of congressional pay became a sideshow as part of the debate over the federal government’s budget.

The House and Senate agreed to a debt-ceiling compromise embodied in the No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013. A key part of the legislation would delay pay to members of the House or Senate if they didn’t approve a budget by mid-April. (So technically, it would have been more accurately called the No Budget, Delayed Pay Act.)

Many scholars saw a conflict with the 27th Amendment, since even delaying pay counts as “varying the compensation.” Congressional leaders were clearly aware of the concern; a section of the bill says the delayed-pay option prevents a “violation of the 27th article of Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Senate passed its first proposed budget in four years in March; the House also passed a proposed budget.

The 27th Amendment also popped up in the debate over the sequester, the forced across-the-board federal spending cuts imposed after another congressional impasse.

Members of the House and Senate were immune to pay cuts and furloughs, unlike many other government workers, because such cuts would change their pay while Congress is in session—in violation of the 27th Amendment.

Several Congress members did agree to voluntarily return part of their pay to the Treasury Department in a show of support for sequestered workers.

In March, some House representatives introduced bills that would cut the pay of the next Congress by at least 8 percent, an amount equivalent to the cuts to other workers’ pay triggered by the sequester. In April, Don Barber, a U.S. House representative from Arizona, pushed for a 20 percent pay cut for Congress in its next term.

Despite Congress’ low approval ratings, not everyone thinks Congress deserves a pay freeze or pay cut.

Congress hasn’t seen a pay hike since 2009. Its members are now paid $174,000 per year on average.

One person who endorsed a small pay raise for Congress was President Obama, who signed an executive order late last year that gave House and Senate members a 1 percent raise as part of hike for federal workers. Congress rejected the offer.

Dan Schuman, a policy counsel for the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, caused a bit of stir on Slate.com in an April opinion piece that advocated for large pay raises for Congress.

“Many very competent people no longer want the job,” he argued, pointing to the much higher salaries at lobby groups, as well as other countries that pay their public officials more.

If Congress had accepted a cost-of-living raise for the past four years, its average compensation would be $183,000 a year based on COLA estimates, or an 8 percent raise from 2008.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

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Today we celebrate the anniversary of the 27th Amendment (ratified May 7, 1992). Here’s what you need to know:

WHAT IT DOES

The 27th Amendment makes sure that members of Congress can’t vote for their own pay raises (or pay cuts)–any change in compensation won’t take effect until the next election.

WHY IT WAS ADDED

The 27th Amendment, which is the most recent addition to the Constitution, was actually among the amendments that James Madison proposed in 1789. Ten of those amendments were approved and became known as the Bill of Rights, but this one languished for another 203 years, making it the longest ratification process in U.S. history.

So what revived Madison’s original vision? In 1982, Gregory Watson, a 20-year-old college student at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote a paper on Madison’s unratified proposal. He launched a letter-writing campaign and within a decade, in large part thanks to his efforts, what would have been the Second Amendment was passed as the 27th Amendment.

WORD-FOR-WORD

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

Civic holidays are occasions to commemorate America’s history, celebrate our rights and responsibilities as citizens, and learn about our constitutional ideals. Download a PDF of the 2013 Civic Calendar here.

Holly Munson is the assistant editor of Constitution Daily.

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The White House ratcheted up the pressure on Sunday by releasing numbers on how the across-the-board budget cuts would hurt each state and the District of Columbia. Then, several GOP governors jumped into the battle, voicing concerns about disappearing federal funds to states. Republicans are also nervous about how the cuts will affect the military and defense preparedness.

At the same time, accusations were flying around Capitol Hill that one party or another was stalling a deal on the budget cuts, to make a point or to extract some longer-term concession in budget negotiations.

Here’s what you need to know about the sequester, including some online resources if you want to become a “policy wonk” and start crunching some numbers:

1. Who created this sequester thing in the first place?

The actual tool to cut government spending for the military and social programs, across the board, dates back to the eras of President Ronald Reagan and President Bill Clinton. The current sequester threat is part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, or BCA.

The BCA contained a “poison pill”–the threat of stark budget cuts by January 2013–if a committee of House and Senate members couldn’t deal with a separate but related problem, the debt ceiling. That committee failed in late 2011.

The sequester threat was pushed back to March 1, 2013, as part of a compromise made in January over the dreaded “fiscal cliff.” The cliff was the combination of the debt ceiling expiring, tax laws expiring, and the sequester cuts taking affect at the same time.

2. Why is the sequester threat such a bad thing?

Whether the sequester is good or evil is debatable. Research from the Congressional Budget Office in January pointed out the sequester could cut the nation’s gross domestic product by more than 1 percent this year. Some forecasts said more than 700,000 jobs could be lost if the cuts are fully implemented. Others are higher.

For now, Wall Street isn’t fully convinced a full-blown recession is on the way, partly because there’s still an expectation of a sequester deal at some point.

In the long run, the sequester cuts would help cut the government deficit, which would likely benefit the economy. But it would be a painful path, since the immediate cuts to social programs and military spending would hurt constituents dear to both parties.

3. So what exactly is getting cut?

The sequestration of funds requires that most government agencies cut their budgets by the same percentage across the board. Currently, the cuts add up to $1.2 trillion over a decade. It will be $85 billion for the 2013 fiscal year, which started in October.

Right now, non-military government agencies need to cut their costs by 8.2 percent starting on March 1, 2013. Defense branches will have to cut costs by 9.4 percent. (Those percentages will be lower for the first year of cuts.)

Last fall, President Barack Obama’s administration gave a detailed report through the Office of Management and Budget about which agencies had to cut costs–and which government folks were exempt.

Included in the mandatory cuts is money that members of Congress use to hire and maintain their staffs. But pay for Congress won’t get cut, because their pay, at least for the current term, is protected by the 27th Amendment.

Congressional pay is just one of many programs exempt from cuts. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Most exempt programs are mandatory, and include Social Security and Medicaid; refundable tax credits to individuals; and low-income programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Supplemental Security Income.”

But federal government services could be directly affected that include everything from air traffic controllers to food inspectors.

4. How might the sequester hit home for me?

Let’s look at the three states that contain or border the National Constitution Center: Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. If you want to do your own research, The Washington Post has a very detailed interactive feature.

According the White House’s figures, Pennsylvania will lose $26.4 million in funding for education, while New Jersey will lose $11.7 million and Delaware will lose $1.4 million.

In addition, the estimated numbers of civilian jobs that could see furloughs are 26,000 for Pennsylvania, 11,000 for New Jersey, and 2,000 for Delaware.

Funding will be cut for some social programs related to daycare, Head Start, meals for seniors, vaccinations for children, and educators who work with the disabled.

But according to the magazine Governing, about 82 percent of federal funds to states aren’t included in the sequester cuts. For example, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are exempt.

Delaware Governor Jack Markell told Governing on Friday that the cuts will be felt.

“This is not some theoretical number you toss up in the air,” Markell said. “This is impacting real people, vulnerable people. … For many of us, our state budgets are significantly challenged. We’re not really in a position to say ‘we’re going to supplant with state funds.’ ”

That’s the same problem that Governor Tom Corbett and Governor Chris Christie face in two states that need every penny from the federal government, especially for educational programs.

The timing of these cuts is still up in the air and could be made on a department-by-department level.

According to The Washington Post, federal employees need five weeks’ notice before their days can be furloughed. States will need to make cuts based on the availability of other local funds that can make up the difference.

5. What happens next?

The next big deadline for Congress, assuming the sequester goes into effect on Friday, is March 27. That’s when stopgap budget funding for federal government operations runs out and the government faces a possible shutdown. The deadline for the debt ceiling follows next, on May 18.

Expect negotiations over the sequester to be rolled into talks about the continuing resolution and a federal government shutdown in late March.

Matthew Yglesias from Slate.com puts the sequester versus the shutdown in a broader context.

“The good news is that the tough negotiations that’ll be needed to either avert or else end a government shutdown provide ample opportunity to resolve the problems associated with the sequester. For starters, however the appropriations dispute is resolved, it’ll end up superseding sequestration in terms of how much money is spent overall,” he says.

What’s unknown for the states affected by the sequester cuts is how much spending will return after a new overall budget deal is reached in Washington.

Republicans want federal spending cuts in return for concessions made in the fiscal cliff deal in January.

Scott Bomboy is the Editor-In-Chief of the National Constitution Center.

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Technically, the mandatory cuts to military and domestic federal spending are part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The act contained a “poison pill”–the threat of stark budget cuts by January 2013 in the form of what’s known as the sequester.

That threat was pushed back to March 1, 2013, as part of a compromise made in January. But now, barring a last-second deal, it looks like the sequester will happen.

The sequestration of funds requires that most government agencies cut their budgets by the same percentage across the board. Currently, the cuts add up to $1.2 trillion over a decade.

Right now, non-military government agencies need to cut their costs by 8.2 percent starting on March 1, 2013. Defense branches will have to cut costs by 9.4 percent. (Those percentages could be lower for the first year of cuts.)

Last fall, President Barack Obama’s administration gave a detailed report, via the Office of Management and Budget, about which agencies had to cut costs–and which government folks were exempt.

“The number of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents, correctional officers, and federal prosecutors would be slashed. The Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to oversee and manage the Nation’s airspace and air traffic control would be reduced,” said the OMB.

Included in the mandatory cuts are expenses the members of Congress use to hire and maintain their staffs. In all, the operational expenses for Congress add up to $133 million annually.

Staffers face 22 days of furloughs, which add up to about a 20 percent pay cut for them, and layoffs lurk as a possibility.

Unless, of course, you are an actual member of Congress. Your pay can’t be cut as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act.

So why are the “bosses” in Congress not suffering with the staff, at least not until later this spring?

The 27th Amendment to the Constitution forbids Congress from changing its own pay during a current  term of Congress. The sequester “poison pill” in the 2011 Budget Control Act was scheduled to go into effect on January 2, 2013, the last day of the prior Congress.

The actual rules for who gets sequestered, and who doesn’t, are set by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985, as amended. The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 can also be a factor when a sequester goes into effect.

Congressional pay is just one of many programs that will be exempt from cuts. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Most exempt programs are mandatory, and include Social Security and Medicaid; refundable tax credits to individuals; and low-income programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Supplemental Security Income.”

Somehow, Congress found a way to delay its own pay, possibly until January 2015, by agreeing to put its pay in escrow on April 16, 2013, as part of the fiscal cliff deal. Even that act has been subject to a vigorous debate as a possible violation of the 27th Amendment, and it could be challenged if the budget deadlock drags out.

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The House had passed the “No Budget, No Pay” bill last week and sent it to the Senate for consideration. Senators tried to tack four amendments onto the bill, but the measures were defeated on Thursday.

The legislation now heads to President Obama’s desk.

A key part of the legislation delays pay to members of the House or Senate if they don’t approve a budget by mid-April.

According to section 2 of the bill, a payroll administrator would withhold Congress members’ pay after April 15, 2013, if one or both houses of Congress couldn’t agree on a fiscal year 2014 budget. The money would be held in an escrow account and given back to Congress members when a budget was passed or at the end of the current 113th Congress in January 1, 2015.

The 27th Amendment is the most recent amendment added to the Constitution.

“No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened,” the amendment reads, as approved in 1992.

In short, the amendment states that a sitting Congress can’t change its pay while it is in session.

And that has some critics saying the “No Budget, No Pay” act doesn’t square with the Constitution.

Among the critics is UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, who gave a detailed explanation on the website Talking Points Memo last week.

“The answer is unclear because the 27th Amendment has never been authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court,” Winkler said in an email to the website. “Yet it seems almost certainly unconstitutional. Withholding pay effectively ‘var[ies] the compensation’ of lawmakers.”

The congressional leaders who championed the act don’t agree with Winkler. Section 2, paragraph 4, of the act specifically says that the pay-escrow option is being used to avoid a “violation of the 27th article of Amendment to the Constitution.”

If a constitutional challenge were to happen to the law, it would most likely come after Congress fails to reach a budget deal, and members of Congress sue to get their pay released from escrow.

The Senate hasn’t approved a budget since 2009 and the current debt-ceiling battle has been ongoing since the summer of 2011.

If the “No Budget, No Pay” case makes it to the Supreme Court, that may not even happen until the current Congress has left the building in Washington. In most cases, it takes more than two years to get a congressional act overturned by the high court.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

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Any such challenge could take years in the appeals process as it heads to the Supreme Court and would possibly happen after the current 113th Congress has concluded its business.

The No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013 was passed last week in the House and extends the debt ceiling into May. Senate leaders and President Obama had said previously they would support the measure.

As part of the deal, pay for Congress members will be placed in an escrow account if an official budget isn’t approved by April 15, 2013.

After that date, if the House or Senate doesn’t approve a budget, the pay for the chamber in violation gets put aside until a budget is approved, or the current Congress ends in January 2015, and the money is released.

Link: Read the No Budget, No Pay Act

The 27th Amendment says that “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” It was approved in 1992.

Some critics argue that by putting its pay on hold, Congress is “varying” its pay and directly violating the 27th Amendment, since a sitting Congress can’t change its own compensation. At the very least, they say, the law can’t take effect until the next Congress is seated in 2015.

More vocal critics are crying foul and call the bill a direct constitutional violation.

In a Constitution Daily article last week, we pointed to a comment that UCLA law professor Adam Winkler made to the website Talking Points Memo, which states the crux of a bigger argument.

“The answer is unclear because the 27th Amendment has never been authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court,” Winkler said in an email to the website. “Yet it seems almost certainly unconstitutional. Withholding pay effectively ‘var[ies] the compensation’ of lawmakers.”

The congressional leaders who championed the act don’t agree with Winkler. Section 2, paragraph 4, of the act specifically says that the escrow option is being used to avoid a “violation of the 27th article of Amendment to the Constitution.”

But a district court ruling from last December might show how a lawsuit about the act could make its way to the Supreme Court.

In the case of Common Cause v. Biden, a U.S. district court in December 2012 found that four members of the House didn’t have a legal right to sue the Senate over its filibuster policy.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan tossed out the lawsuit, in part, because the four House members couldn’t prove they were harmed by the Senate’s filibuster policy. (In this case, the complaint was related to the stalling of the DREAM Act and DISCLOSE Act in the Senate in 2010.)

The No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013, at least on the surface, would present a different challenge, since a Congress member going without a paycheck for months might be directly harmed financially.

Senators from both parties are in the middle class, and the House had 144 nay votes on the bill.

So it would take just a handful of unhappy Congress members to file a lawsuit to get the appeals process in motion.

If No Budget, No Pay case makes it to the Supreme Court, that may not even happen until the current Congress has left the building in Washington. In most cases, it takes more than two years to get a congressional act overturned by the high court.

According to the 2010 supplement to the official Constitution with Annotations, there were 165 congressional acts that the Supreme Court have found unconstitutional since 1803.

In recent years, two rejections of a congressional act took less than one year, and a few took just over a year. But in most cases, it takes some time for a case to make its way to the highest court in the land.

In June 1986, the Supreme Court rejected parts of the Balanced Budget Act passed in December 1985.

And in October 1989, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act, which banned burning the American flag. The Supreme Court overturned it in June 1990 in the case of United States v. Eichman.

Another act was rejected in 17 months’ time. It was in June 1997 that the Supreme Court ruled against sections of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in February 1996.

Also, in December 2003, the Supreme Court overturned several sections of the McCain-Feingold Act from March 2002.

President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act almost joined that list, just missing by one vote on the Supreme Court. It was passed in March 2010 and the Roberts Court ruled in June 2012, about two years and three months after the act passed Congress.

The first congressional act ever rejected by the Supreme Court was probably its most important early decision.

The case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 established the concept of judicial review and the Supreme Court’s power to say when an act of Congress was unconstitutional.

The Marbury decision overturned an act from 1789.

The famous (or infamous) Dred Scott decision from the court also overturned a congressional act, the 1820 Missouri Compromise.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.

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The 27th Amendment is the most recent amendment, and there are many people who probably don’t remember what it stands for: congressional pay raises.

“No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened,” the amendment reads, as approved in 1992.

In short, the amendment states that a sitting Congress can’t change its pay while it is in session.

It’s not a new idea. The amendment was proposed back in 1789 by Founding Father James Madison along with other amendments that became the Bill of Rights, but it took 203 years for it to become the law of the land. In 1982, a college undergraduate student, Gregory Watson, discovered that the proposed amendment could still be ratified and started a grassroots campaign.

In 1992, Alabama became the 38th state to sign off on the 27th Amendment, making it a law.

Since then, the 27th Amendment has gotten very little publicity, expect for the occasional news story about Watson’s personal quest to get it passed.

That is, until late last week, when GOP House leaders proposed linking congressional pay to the budget debate. It didn’t take long for journalists and academics to recall the 27th Amendment.

On Monday, the House Rules Committee published its proposed bill, about one hour before President Barack Obama’s inauguration. House GOP leaders seemed convinced the proposed bill didn’t violate the 27th Amendment.

According to section 2 of the bill, a payroll administrator would withhold Congress’ pay after April 15, 2013, if it couldn’t agree on a fiscal year 2014 budget. The money would be held in an escrow account and given back to Congress members when a budget was passed or at the end of the current 113th Congress in January 1, 2015.

In exchange, Congress would suspend the debt ceiling until May 18, 2013.

Initially, House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa, a Republican, said he thought the bill was unconstitutional, according to a report on the website Roll Call. The site said Issa’s office quickly issued a statement, saying that “the final proposal brought before the House will have resolved any constitutional questions and that it will have my support.”

Others were quick to point out that withholding pay, even temporarily, would “vary” the compensation for Congress members, and in their opinion, presented a direct violation of the 27th Amendment.

Among the critics was UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, who gave a detailed explanation on the website Talking Points Memo.

“The answer is unclear because the 27th Amendment has never been authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court,” Winkler said in an email to the website. “Yet it seems almost certainly unconstitutional. Withholding pay effectively ‘var[ies] the compensation’ of lawmakers.”

Almost a year ago, the bipartisan political group No Labels said that a “No Budget No Pay” plan was constitutional, as long as the pay withholding took place in the Congress after the one that passed the plan.

“If Congress doesn’t act in 2012, a No Budget, No Pay law could not take effect until 2015 at the earliest—meaning we’re more likely to have another three years of budgetary dysfunction,” the group said as part of a lengthy explanation on its blog.

The House will vote on the measure on Wednesday and if approved, it will head to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

There was one clue this weekend that Senate Democrats will pursue their own budget for the first time since 2009, and may not have a lot to lose by passing the debt-ceiling bill.

Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said not only will his caucus pursue a budget, but it will also seek to add more tax hikes in addition to spending cuts desired by Republicans.

And on Tuesday, a White House statement said the President Barack Obama wouldn’t oppose the bill.

The GOP House debt-ceiling plan also doesn’t address the issue of the sequestration, a forced $1.2 trillion in government spending cuts that will now go into effect in March.

If the 27th Amendment doesn’t get in the way and the debt ceiling is postponed until May, then the sequestration will become a key political issue. The steep sending cuts would likely lead to job losses in the private and defense sectors.

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American constitutional history has not moved in a straight line, from the Founding to the 21st Century. Its development is a wavering line, with twists and turns that were far from predictable. The amendment process under Article V has followed a meandering path — in fact, the latest amendment, the 27th, dealing with congressional salaries and ratified in 1992, was actually one of the first proposed, in 1789. Meandering, too, have been the Supreme Court’s interpretations of what the Constitution ultimately means — for any given day and time.

How, then, is it possible to assign a place in history for a new constitutional development? Does it rank among the most important, and with what can it be compared, closely or loosely? Where, one may ask, will a Supreme Court ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act stand in history?

This coming week, the nine Supreme Court Justices will set out on another constitutional journey, and it probably will be a quick one: it might well be concluded in almost exactly three months. The three days of hearings on the new federal health care law — the most time set aside for a case in more than four decades — will be saturated with history. Monday’s argument will focus on an 1867 law, Tuesday’s will talk about precedents going back at least to 1942 and maybe all the way back to 1819, and Wednesday’s will have echoes of states’ rights doctrine all the way from the Philadelphia Convention and its Grand Compromise in 1787.

And, when the Court does rule, probably by late June, few doubt that it will have done something historic.

Without exaggeration, the final ruling has the potential to be the most important declaration on how the Constitution divides up power between national and state governments since the New Deal days some three quarters of a century ago. Without exaggeration, it could be the most important pronouncement on the federal “safety net” since the Social Security Act was upheld by the Court in 1937. Without exaggeration, a decision to strike down all or part of the new health law could be the most severe rebuff of Congress’s power over the national economy since the Sick Chicken Case in 1935. And, without exaggeration, a nullification of the Act in whole or in part could be the most devastating blow to presidential power and prestige since the Steel Seizure Case in 1952.

The law at issue is not directly about civil rights, but for the nation’s working poor, the coming ruling on the law’s validity could be as important to them as a 1938 decision was for racial minorities, essentially starting the modern civil rights revolution. And for individuals who want to be left alone by their government, the final decision may be a reminder of a 1905 decision that first spelled out a theory of individual liberty that, in time, would contribute importantly decades afterward to that same civil rights revolution.

Yes, it is that important — at least in potential. Whether or not it lives up to that potential may depend, to a significant degree, on how the Justices react to the 90-minute argument that opens the week on Monday. Many observers, and certainly most of the media, have been waiting most eagerly for Tuesday’s two-hour argument, when the biggest cog in the entire machinery of the Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate, is up for review.

But, in the end, the Court just might not rule at all on the individual mandate if it were to decide that no challenger had a right to go to court to contest the mandate’s constitutionality. That is Monday’s issue, and the first lawyer to step up to the Court’s lectern this week will be urging the Justices to do just that — to take a pass. Although neither the challengers nor the federal government currently believes that the federal Anti-Injunction Act was a bar to the lawsuits, the lower courts took differing positions on that, and the Justices have agreed to sort it out, naming a Washington lawyer with no other part in the case to make the point.

The Court itself had taken differing positions on that, in rulings decades ago, but then switched and steadily reinforced the Act’s ban on lawsuits that threatened to stop the U.S. Treasury from collecting tax revenues. If it should turn out that the Justices do apply the Act to the lawsuits against the mandate, the mandate would survive this test, and maybe $4 billion of tax revenue would still come in over coming years.

That would take away from this case much of its historic potential, because the constitutional issues surrounding the mandate are so momentous and yet would remain unsettled for now. But such a ruling would be one of the most significant gestures the Court has made to protect the national Treasury in 50 years — an action that could rank constitutionally with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. It would be a strong message to lower courts to keep the courthouse doors closed to attempts to block federal legislation that is designed, at least in part, to produce revenue for the government’s coffers. But the practical effect, for the mandate, would be that it could not be challenged until after it had actually gone into effect — in 2014 — and was then enforced by the government.

There would be a political effect, too: the mandate’s future would remain an issue in this year’s congressional and presidential campaigns, and the outcome of the national election on November 6 could either doom the mandate to a repeal effort, or save it, at least until it went into effect. The issue of its constitutionality might not return to the Court until 2015 at the earliest.

However, when Monday’s argument winds up, close to noon, the nation — and even the Court — will not yet know whether the mandate’s fate is going to be decided. The Court will move on to Tuesday, to explore the mandate itself as if its validity were going to be settled. And that is the argument in which the biggest parade of history will march across the courtroom.

The federal government gets to open the argument that day, and its top Supreme Court advocate will seek to persuade the Court that history is on the government’s side, that health care is in a crisis of national proportions, that Congress must have the authority to rise to such occasions, and that this controversy calls for judicial modesty. For almost as long as there has been constitutional history, that attorney seems sure to argue, economic crises too big for the states to handle have been left to Congress. If Congress was constitutionally disabled from enacting this law, it will have had to surrender core constitutional power, the Court may be told.

And then two lawyers for the challengers will take turns arguing that this case does not involve just another episode of familiar history, but rather that this is constitutional history starting over. Congress, they will say, has never dared to so manage Americans’ private lives as it now has attempted, without precedent and without even a hint of authority from the Constitution. If Congress can do this, there is no invasion of private choice that will not be constitutionally tolerable, the Justices almost certainly will be told.

Wednesday will be a double-header on constitutional history. In the morning, the Court will return — as so often in the past — to the fundamental division of government authority between Congress and the courts — horizontal separation of powers that James Madison thought essential to individual liberty. That will be at the center of the argument on what happens to the remainder of the new health care law if the individual mandate were to be struck down. And, in the afternoon, the Court will trace many of history’s earlier steps along the line that divides national and state power — the vertical separation that Thomas Jefferson thought essential to the sovereignty and dignity of governments closest to the people. That will be the focus of the argument over the expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor, for the first time providing those benefits to millions of the working poor and to childless adults.

By week’s end, America will have witnessed — for most people, from afar, because only a couple of hundred seats are available for those who will see it actually happen — a deeply serious and probably quite revealing conversation about the Constitution and what it might mean 225 years after it was written.

Lyle Denniston is the National Constitution Center’s Adviser on Constitutional Literacy. He has reported on the Supreme Court for 54 years, currently covering it for SCOTUSblog, an online clearing house of information about the Supreme Court’s work.

Working at the National Constitution Center, the Constitution Daily writers all pay probably more attention to news items relating to the Constitution than most folks. So when this story came to our attention last month, we were fascinated by Maryland’s belated attention to the 17^th Amendment.

It got me thinking about how many amendments experienced similar fates and also about those which never made it through the entire ratification process. Here’s the scoop on legislative action (or inaction has the case may be), by the numbers:

2 – The number of ways the Constitution can be amended, as described in Article V

11,000+ – The number of amendments that have been introduced in Congress

6 – The number of amendments that have then passed from Congress but have not gotten enough state votes for ratification

35 – The number of states that have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, three short of the necessary 38

128 – The number of years it took for Tennessee, the last state, to ratify the 15^th Amendment, eliminating race as a barrier to voting

8 – The number of states that have yet to ratify the 26^th Amendment, setting the voting age at 18

1995 – The year that Mississippi ratified the 13^th Amendment, the amendment abolishing slavery

202 – The number of years it took for the 27^th Amendment, the last, to become ratified, originally proposed in 1789

There has even been a proposal to change the amendment process!

Each of these numbers could probably spawn blog posts of their own because of the history and backstory involved, but the most intriguing to me was the difference between the number of proposals submitted versus the number of amendments that have actually been fully ratified. I think it shows that as sentiments and opinions about laws change, there is a clear vehicle for reflecting them. Yet, at the same time, it shows that not every idea may be worth setting so definitively in the Constitution. The process of ratification ensures that any major changes have solid, serious weight and consideration behind them.

If you want even more information about proposed Amendments, here are the Top 10 that haven’t quite made it through the process.

Paige M. Scofield is a Management Consultant at Accenture and former Programs and Communications Coordinator at the National Constitution Center. She hopes to see the ERA ratified in her lifetime.