Pelosi Dodges Chance to End Automatic Pay Raises
In so doing, though, lawmakers defeated a Senate measure to abolish the automatic pay hikes and force them into the deep discomfort of casting actual votes to give themselves raises.
No one is rushing to defend the current system in a tanking economy that has rendered the annual raise a quaint memory for many outside Washington.
Even inside the Beltway, President Barack Obama has frozen pay for about 100 White House workers making six-figure salaries – an acknowledgment that appearances matter to a financially fragile nation.
But scrapping Congress own automatic, cost-of-living raises for good? Thats where congressional leaders drew the line this week – and buried it beneath an avalanche of legislative process, blame-passing and rhetoric.
Competing proposals on the Senate floor earlier in the week effectively canceled each other out.
Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican with personal issues that could threaten his re-election, talked of adding a ban on automatic congressional raises to a $410 billion spending bill already passed by the House.
Great idea, alleged Majority Leader Harry Reid, whos also facing a tough re-election fight next year. But adding the pay issue to the bill would mean sending it back to the House, and that could kill the whole thing, Reid said.
Reids problem, as he described it, was with the process and not scrapping automatic pay raises. In fact, Reid said, congressional raises shouldnt be automatic. So he proposed an alternative: a bill all its own almost identical to Vitters.
Nope, Vitter said, because Pelosi was almost certain to ignore it.
Reid bristled.
“He knows that I cant represent what the speaker is going to do,” Reid replied. “She doesnt know Im here doing this. She runs her little show over there and I do my best to have some input on what happens here.”
Well, not quite. Reids gambit – offering an alternative to senators who support the idea without actually having to vote on it – was pretty much known throughout the Capitol hours beforehand. When Vitter forced a vote on his amendment to end automatic raises, the Senate rejected it 52-45.
So Vitter dropped his objection Thursday and, in a letter to the majority leader, urged Reid to bring up his bill. Jim Manley, Reids spokesman, said the Nevada Democrats plans for the bill were in flux.
The nations founders set up the system to make congressional pay raises inherently difficult for those who would receive them. The Constitution requires Congress to set its own pay and be accountable to voters every few years during elections.
Congress has raised its own pay in stand-alone bills more than two dozen times, according to the Congressional Research Service. But in 1989, it passed a law providing for annual cost-of-living adjustments unless Congress votes otherwise. Lawmakers voted to skip their annual pay raises in 2007 and earlier this week voted to forego next years because of the recession.
Their latest pay raise of $4,700 took effect in January and brought congressional salaries to $174,000.
Automatic pay raises curb grandstanding on the issue, said a spokesman for Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who supported the 1989 legislation.
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