"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."
No law that would pay a political official an income cannot be put into effect until after there has been another election. The purpose of this amendment is to make sure members of Congress don't give themselves a pay raise without first allowing people to vote (indirectly) on it.
This amendment only controls how and when raises for Congressmen are implemented, but it does not control pay increases. Today it has turned into an excuse to interpret Congress's routine salary decreases as unconstitutional.
I think this amendment is one of the hardest ones to understand, but this article gave me some information on how Congress can sort of warp laws in their favor. Also, apparently what revived this proposed amendment 200 years in the making was a college student named Gregory Watson who wrote a paper proposing that it could still be ratified (a paper he got a C on). He launched a letter-writing campaign in 1983 to convince state legislatures to finish the process, and the latest amendment to the US Constitution was born in 1992.
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