No Congressional Pay Raises Gets Bi-Partisan Support

Just when taxpayers’ faith in Congress reaches a low point, a beacon of light shines through this week when Senators David Vitter (R-La.) and Claire Mc Caskill (D-Mo.) reintroduced legislation that would end the procedure of automatic annual pay raises for members of Congress.   Ok, that opening sentence was a bit dramatic but the fact is that any good news coming out of Washington should be embraced and celebrated.  Existing law provides automatic pay adjustments for members of Congress every year, regardless of what they do right, or nowadays more like what they do wrong, the members get a pay bump automatically to adjust for cost of living increases.  It would be nice if everybody received a guaranteed raise.  The problem is that in the real world this concept is completely unconceivable.  But that quality seems to fit with a lot of what Congress does these days.

There’s one more catch with the current law governing these pay increases.  Under the current law, members never have to go on record and admit they think they’re deserving of this raise.  What this fact demonstrates is that members of Congress are not always as clueless as they appear.  When it comes to protecting their own interests, it’s shocking how well they know what to do.  And that is precisely why the law that’s currently on the books does not force them to vote, or go on record, for a raise.  If they had to reveal their intentions by publically casting a vote, you bet they’d reconsider what their vote should be.   The bottom line is that the current arrangement removes the transparency and accountability that all constituents deserve when it comes to the actions of the members of Congress that they elected.  If members of Congress think they deserve a raise then they should have the chutzpah to come out and state it publically.  And fortunately, Sens. Vitter and Mc Caskill agree.

The proposal put forth by the two senators would change the law and making it so any increase in Congressional salary must be brought to a vote and be passed by both houses of Congress.   While this all seems like common sense to most people, somehow it has escaped conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C.    In a city that defines the term obfuscation and “behind closed doors,” Senator Vitter remarked that with this legislation Washington could “start working together in a bipartisan fashion by flatly requiring any member of Congress who wants an automatic raise each year to publicly ask for, defend it, and explain it to their constituents by putting it to a vote.”   Asking members to defend a vote don’t seem like a novel concept, but when the current law is you do nothing and you get a pay increase, this is a welcome and needed change.   Washington could certainly use a lot more of the commonsense included in the Vitter and Mc Caskill legislation.

Putting members on the record to vote for pay increases is a first step in a larger problem about Congressional pay.  In 2011 TPA released a study with Our Generation that showed that members of Congress are way overpaid making $174,000 per year ($285,000 per year with benefits).  The study found that there is no question that Congressional pay is out of line with what an average American worker brings home. Members of Congress make 3.4 times more than the average full-time annual American salary of $50,875.

Passage of this legislation won’t solve all of the country’s fiscal woes but it will be a step in the right direction and bring a glimmer of common sense to Washington, D.C.