Taxpayers should sue legislators who gave themselves pay raises

This editorial was published Thursday, July 21, in The Mercury, Pottstown, Pa.

When somebody confronts you on the street and steals your money or breaks into your house and runs off with your valuables, you call the police. The judicial system is designed to protect law-abiding citizens from those who are not willing to live by society’s rules.

When elected officials commit crimes, residents have two options: vote them out of office or turn to the courts for relief.

The first option is on the minds of almost every Pennsylvania taxpayer who was recently mugged by their own elected representatives. Judging from the articles, editorials and letters to the editor appearing in newspapers across the state, the great money-grab of 2005 has galvanized citizens as nothing has in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the perpetrators knew what they were doing. This was a well-planned crime.

The members of the state legislature who voted themselves pay raises of 16 percent to 34 percent a year did so in a year when none of them face reelection. The entire House membership and half of the state Senate won’t be on the ballot until 2006, but that’s 10 months away for the primary election and 16 months until the general election. The politicians are counting on the public forgetting the holdup by the time they face the voters.

Which brings us to the courts. While the way the pay raise was approved is reprehensible (a vote in the middle of the night without any public discussion of the numbers agreed to in secret by party bosses), there’s no debate that the legislators had the authority to give themselves pay raises. They can grant themselves titles of nobility and prance around in crowns and robes if they want.

But what is questionable is the scheme the politicians concocted to collect their pay raises today even though the Constitution prohibits such action.

From the Pennsylvania Constitution: Article II, Compensation, Section 8 ... No members of either House shall during the term for which he may have been elected, receive any increase of salary, or mileage, under any law passed during such term.

Can the language be any clearer? The Constitution forbids members of the legislature who vote themselves a pay raise from collecting that money until their current term expires. The Constitution was written that way so politicians would have to win reelection before enjoying the spoils of a pay raise. But our esteemed legislators have decided to start collecting their ill-gotten gain right away as "unvouchered expenses."

They have made a mockery of the very Constitution they swore to uphold. A salary is not an "unvouchered expense." Maybe somebody should tip off the IRS that Pennsylvania legislators are collecting part of their salary under the table.

There have been rumblings by a few citizen activists of filing a lawsuit to stop the pay hikes. Something similar was tried in 1995, the last time the Harrisburg politicians robbed the taxpayers. Unbelievably, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court didn’t have a problem with this flagrant breach of the Constitution.

This is an issue the court needs to revisit. And we hope the current crop of justices are able to read. The problem is that the very justices who would be asked to rule on the constitutionality of the pay-raise issue are themselves getting a pay raise. If they toss out the Legislature’s vote, the judges would be rejecting their own pay raise.

The way the legislature went about handing itself more money "demeans the entire legislative and democratic process ... it’s just a cynical way to do business," said Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a non-partisan citizens lobby group.

A lawsuit by the citizens of Pennsylvania is the first step. Voting out every member who approved the pay raise is the next step. And if necessary, impeaching the judges who refuse to uphold the Constitution should be the third step.

Something’s rotten in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It’s becoming clear that a thorough cleansing of the ruling class in Harrisburg is the only way to eliminate the stench.

Copyright 2005 The Mercury