In case you missed it last week, Congress did its part to reverse the effects of the recession on the economy.
Well, actually, the actions of our dubious lawmakers will do much to offset the effects of the recession on their own personal economies, but unfortunately the legislation won’t do much for you or me, or the 1.2 million Americans laid off since the recession began in March.
Late Friday night, on Dec. 7 – yes, Pearl Harbor day, no less – the Senate used a 65-33 procedural vote to beat back an effort to stop an automatic congressional pay raise of 3.4 percent, or $4,900, from taking effect in January. Nice of them to do that, huh?
How can this happen, you ask? That’s easy: Congress made giving itself a pay raise virtually automatic some years ago.
Under a 1989 law, legislators get a “cost-of-living” increase unless House and Senate members specifically vote to block the increase, “a mechanism that often lets the increases take effect with little notice,” The Associated Press reported. The law applies, obviously, regardless of war, famine, a poor economy or anything else.
Not all members behaved badly. The effort that was defeated at midnight Friday, Dec. 7, by the Senate’s hat trick procedural vote was led by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. In his words, the increase should not happen as long as “our economy is in a recession and hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off.”
You got that right, Russ. Now lawmakers’ salaries have been boosted well into the white collar pay range of $150,000 a year.
If all things were equal, that’d be a bargain for American taxpayers. But the way our leaders do business, that’s an obscene amount of money for men and women who job out all of their tough decisions to bureaucrats and agency chiefs and work only half a year.
And not only that, the timing just plain stinks.
Who else voted for this outrage? Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., voted not to block the increase. AP said 14 of the 30 senators running for re-election in 2002 voted against the raise. Two who will retire in January – Sens. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. – voted for it. A third retiree, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., didn’t vote.
President Bush has some culpability here, too. Traditionally, pay-raise scams are included in Treasury appropriations bills, and Bush signed that bill Nov. 12 after it was overwhelmingly passed by both chambers.
Personally, I couldn’t sleep at night knowing I took a pay raise on the people’s dime while many of my constituents are wondering if they can pay heat bills and keep the lights on this winter … let alone provide any sort of Christmas for their family.
What opportunist scumbags our leaders can be. But they are as arrogant as they are because too few Americans are willing to send these career porkers out to pasture at election time.
It is an abomination and an outrage for Congress to have helped themselves to a pay raise during the nation’s worst economic crisis in a decade. Like Sept. 11, Americans should not soon forget that neither war, nor terrorism, nor dark of economy can stop the greed of our lawmakers.
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