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It might surprise many modern Americans to learn that for the first several decades of its existence, the U.S. Congress did not pay salaries to its members. From the inception of the U.S. Congress in 1789 until 1855 (with the exception of one brief period), members of the Senate and House received no salaries and were paid only on a per diem basis while Congress was in session (initially at a rate of $6 per day). Why did members of Congress not initially receive salaries? According to one viral Did you know? meme, it was because our eminently wise Founding Fathers deemed it so as a clever means of preventing the legislators from raising their own pay and thereby economically elevating themselves above the Americans they were supposed to represent: A simple reading of the U.S. Constitution — the same document that established the U.S. Congress in the first place — demonstrates this claim to be false, however. Article I, Section 6 plainly states that The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. First of all, that section did not specify that legislators be paid on a per diem basis rather than a salaried basis (or any other basis); it simply stated that they were to receive compensation in some manner to be determined by law. Second, since members of Congress were to be compensated in a manner ascertained by Law, and Congress is the body that creates the laws of the United States, it was in fact left to Congress to determine how much, and in what manner, they should be compensated for their services: Indeed, as noted in a 1908 history of Congressional Salary Legislation, the question of establishing salaries for various federal officials (including members of Congress) was one of the issues that confronted the very first Congress of the United States back in 1789: Congress itself, and not the Founding Fathers, therefore decided to pay members of Congress via per diems rather than salaries. But why did Congress do that? is an obvious follow-up question, and the answer to that question is because per diem pay for U.S. Congress members had been established by precedent. In the 18th century, being a legislator (whether at the local, state, or federal level) was generally not a full-time job. Legislative bodies were not in session year-round: They typically met only for a few months out of the year, and sometimes they convened only infrequently, irregularly, or when specifically called into session rather than on a fixed schedule. And just because a body was in session didn't necessarily mean all of its members were in attendance — most legislators had other occupations and livelihoods that they had to take time out from in order to serve. Therefore, per diem compensation for actual service was the standard of the time: As for the claim that the intent of the per diem system was to ensure that members of Congress were subject to the same economic and financial conditions as the rest of the nation, we note that at the time the $6 per diem compensation schedule was established, that rate of pay was considered by many critics to be extravagant: It should also be noted that when the very first Congress of the United States approved 12 amendments to the Constitution in 1789, only 10 of those proposed amendments were ratified by the states and became enshrined in U.S. history as the Bill of Rights. One of the two rejected amendments sought to forbid Congress from giving itself pay raises (by requiring that any pay increases apply only to subsequent Congresses). That amendment, now the 27th, was not finally ratified until over 200 years later.
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