UMD Libertarians

By Jordy Yager Posted: 12/17/08 05:41 PM [ET] A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay.

Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it.

“As lawmakers make a big show of forcing auto executives to accept just $1 a year in salary, they are quietly raiding the vault for their own personal gain,” said Daniel O’Connell, chairman of The Senior Citizens League (TSCL), a non-partisan group. “This money would be much better spent helping the millions of seniors who are living below the poverty line and struggling to keep their heat on this winter.” However, at 2.8 percent, the automatic raise that lawmakers receive is only half as large as the 2009 cost of living adjustment of Social Security recipients.
Still, Steve Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Congress should have taken the rare step of freezing its pay, as lawmakers did in 2000.
“Look at the way the economy is and how most people aren’t counting on a holiday bonus or a pay raise — they’re just happy to have gainful employment,” said Ellis. “But you have the lawmakers who are set up and ready to get their next installment of a pay raise and go happily along their way.”
Member raises are often characterized as examples of wasteful spending, especially when many constituents and businesses in members’ districts are in financial despair.
Rep. Harry Mitchell, a first-term Democrat from Arizona, sponsored legislation earlier this year that would have prevented the automatic pay adjustments from kicking in for members next year. But the bill, which attracted 34 cosponsors, failed to make it out of committee.
“They don’t even go through the front door. They have it set up so that it’s wired so that you actually have to undo the pay raise rather than vote for a pay raise,” Ellis said.
Freezing congressional salaries is hardly a new idea on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers have floated similar proposals in every year dating back to 1995, and long before that. Though the concept of forgoing a raise has attracted some support from more senior members, it is most popular with freshman lawmakers, who are often most vulnerable.
In 2006, after the Republican-led Senate rejected an increase to the minimum wage, Democrats, who had just come to power in the House with a slew of freshmen, vowed to block their own pay raise until the wage increase was passed. The minimum wage was eventually increased and lawmakers received their automatic pay hike.
In the beginning days of 1789, Congress was paid only $6 a day, which would be about $75 daily by modern standards. But by 1965 members were receiving $30,000 a year, which is the modern equivalent of about $195,000.
Currently the average lawmaker makes $169,300 a year, with leadership making slightly more. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) makes $217,400, while the minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate make $188,100.
Ellis said that while freezing the pay increase would be a step in the right direction, it would be better to have it set up so that members would have to take action, and vote, for a pay raise and deal with the consequences, rather than get one automatically.
“It is probably never going to be politically popular to raise Congress’s salary,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to find taxpayers saying, ‘Yeah I think I should pay my congressman more’.”

WASHINGTON — Four of Indiana’s 11 members of Congress say they will give up their automatic $4,700 pay raises next year.
The seven others either did not return calls or declined to say whether they would keep the raises, which increase lawmakers’ yearly salaries to $174,000.

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With the economy in a rut and tax revenues declining, Gov. Mitch Daniels has frozen state employees’ pay and is not accepting his scheduled increase from $95,000 to about $108,000.
Pay for members of Congress automatically increases by a cost-of-living adjustment unless lawmakers vote to block it. But they also can decide on their own not to accept the increase, as Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and three House members have.
Rep. Mike Pence said he will donate his pay raise to charities that help Hoosier children and families.
"During these very difficult times," the Columbus Republican said, "many Hoosier families are facing hardship and sacrifice."
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indianapolis, said that if Congress doesn’t pass a bill stopping the annual automatic pay increase, he will return his 2009 increase to the Treasury.
"As we face the most challenging economic crisis in our history, and with many Americans and Hoosiers enduring personal financial hardships, I am opposed to any pay increase for members of Congress in 2009," Burton said.
Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Evansville, donated his 2008 pay increase to charity and will do so again in 2009 to fulfill a campaign promise, according to his spokeswoman.
Spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declined to say whether the leaders are considering freezing pay for all lawmakers.
That should be the first order of business when Congress returns in January, argues the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group.
"While thousands of Americans are facing layoffs and downsizing, Congress should be mortified to accept a raise," said Tom Schatz, the group’s president. "There are a lot of companies and individuals who are just happy to have a job, let alone one that pays $170,000 a year."
Indiana lost 12,800 jobs in November as its unemployment rate outpaced the nation’s.
Chrysler is shutting down all its plants for a month, including the four in Kokomo that employ more than 6,300. GM is temporarily closing 20 factories, including its 2,700-worker truck assembly plant in Fort Wayne. White-collar workers at Clarian Health and Cummins also are getting hit.
Congress did not take up any of at least three bills, including one introduced by Burton, to block next year’s automatic pay raises. Ellsworth, Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Granger, and Rep. Baron Hill, D-Seymour, were among co-sponsors of one of the bills.
Since Congress passed a law in 1989 setting up the automatic increase, lawmakers have voted six times to stop it. The most recent vote was in 2007, after a dispute over whether the minimum wage should be raised before Congress increased its own pay.
Most years, Democrats and Republicans collaborate to prevent a straight vote on the issue. Instead, lawmakers sometimes have been asked to vote on a procedural move of whether to allow debate.
When the House voted in 2007 on whether to protect the 2008 increase, Burton, Pence and Reps. Steve Buyer, R-Monticello, and Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, voted to prevent a debate. Ellsworth, Donnelly and Hill voted for the debate. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Indianapolis, was not in Congress at the time.
When the Senate voted in 2005, Bayh supported a freeze, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., voted to keep the increase. Lugar’s spokesman said at the time that he has consistently supported the system set up in 1989 that was designed to treat lawmakers’ pay in much the way that other senior government officials’ salaries are determined.