Via The Hill: With economy in shambles, Congress gets a raise
If there was ever a time for the Congress to vote to postpone their automatic pay raises, we are in it. Still, I don’t expect that they will.
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December 18th, 2008 at 11:59 am
This does not trouble me one bit. They have a lot of hard work ahead of them and I would rather they be properly remunerated by the people they serve than by other sources of income.
Some years ago a constitutional amendment originally proposed in the early days of the Union was ratified, which requires an intervening election before a raise can take effect. It’s not exactly “automatic.” The point of that amendment is presumably to allow the matter of an approved raise to be an election issue. Despite the bad economy being well known by the time of the election, it was not an election issue. Therefore, the raise can be said to have been both constitutionally and democratically validated.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Politically speaking, however, it seems to me that this would be a good time to postpone the raise.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
If there were ever a time to ignore such picky and petty issues as congressional pay raises, that time is now.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Allowing that this is hardly a major issue and that the amount of money in play is small in relative terms, I am going to disagree.
I would like to see Congress, for once (and now is that best time to ever do this), take every single dollar spent by the federal government seriously.
This hardly strikes me as an unreasonable position.
December 19th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
They all stink to high heaven.