Is this legit?
I received this email.  Could you please read it and, perhaps, investigate the truthfulness of the statements.  I’m wondering if it is true or just a bogus statement for the purpose of inflaming our current dissatification with politicians and the government in general.
— Ron Garner

ANSWER: You received the “28th Amendment” “Congressional Reform” “send it to 20 friends immediately” email that’s making the rounds again. It claims, among other things, that members of Congress don’t have to follow laws  — including sexual harassment — governing everyone else and that their staff members don’t repay their student loans. And, that Congressmen get full-pay retirement after serving only one term.
Both Fact Check and snopes.com have investigated this over the years.
These respected fact checkers found the email is “full of false and outdated claims.”
Fact Check called it “a lot of very old baloney packed into a few words. It never has been true that members of Congress could retire with full pay after one term. That’s a false allegation that has been circulating for at least a decade. A lawmaker might qualify for a pension of 80 percent of final salary, and only after many years of service.
“An even older Internet myth is the claim that members of Congress don’t pay into Social Security. That was true once — but not for the past quarter-century.
“The claim that members of Congress would be somehow ‘exempt’ from the health care legislation is a more recent absurdity. We explained how that false notion got started on the Internet rumor mill in an article we posted on Jan. 20.”
“Finally, the claim that Congress is exempt from ‘many’ of the laws it has passed is 15 years out of date.” In 1994, Congress passed the Congressional Accountability Act (PL 104-1) with an independent, nonpartisan Office of Compliance set up to enforce the laws in Congress.
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