Taxpayer Groups, Radio Talk Show Hosts Reunite to Fight 33% Raise for Congress : Politics: Consumer advocates complain about the timing of the vote. House members may get the raise even if it fails in the Senate.

An unusual coalition of taxpayer groups and radio talk show hosts that helped kill a congressional pay raise earlier this year is once again working to defeat a new proposal for a 33% increase, consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced Monday.

The pay package, which would raise the salaries of members of Congress, judges and top federal workers from $89,500 now to more than $120,000 over the next 14 months, is scheduled to come to a vote in the House on Thursday, along with a companion proposal to reform rules governing the ethical behavior of members of Congress.

Nader and David Keating, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, said they have alerted about 600 radio talk show hosts around the country to the impending vote. In addition, they said, they are supplying detailed material by facsimile machine to about 60 of the talk show hosts who were key players in defeating the last pay raise proposal.

Among the talk show hosts involved in the campaign is Tom Leykis of KFI in Los Angeles, who interviewed Keating by telephone on the pay issue Monday afternoon.

“The network of communications which defeated the congressional pay grab earlier this year is gearing up again,” Nader told a news conference. “You don’t have to do much to energize talk show hosts.”

Nader and Keating complained that the pay proposal will not be made public until one day before the vote--making it what Keating described as “a legislative bolt of lightning.”

“They are basically performing in an anti-democratic way,” Nader said.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said the pay and ethics package, which was drafted by a bipartisan task force headed by Reps. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento) and Lynn Martin (R-Ill.), will be unveiled publicly after it is explained to members of Congress in party caucuses Wednesday.

The House bill would increase salaries by 7.7% next year--the equivalent of the 1989 and 1990 cost-of-living raises provided other government employees. That would boost congressional pay from the current $89,500 to about $96,000.

In 1991, after the 1990 elections, the salaries would climb to more than $120,000 a year, another 25% increase. In those elections, voters will choose candidates for all seats in the House and for one-third of the seats in the Senate.

Foley expressed confidence that the package will pass, but some skeptics, such as Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey), said they doubted whether a majority of House members would vote themselves a pay raise at a time when government programs are being severely cut under the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction legislation.

Under an agreement between House and Senate leaders, House members will receive the increase if a majority of them vote for it, even if the package is rejected by the Senate. This would bring about an unusual disparity in pay for the two chambers.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said a “substantial majority” of senators oppose any pay raise for themselves. As a result, he said, it appears that the House and Senate may wind up with a “differential that is not desirable.”

Despite opposition from Nader and others, Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby, which strongly supported the last pay hike, is also supporting the current pay and ethics package.

Fred Wertheimer, Common Cause president, said the new package answers many of the complaints that were raised about the 51% pay increase rejected earlier this year. Unlike the last one, he said, the 25% increase “would not take effect until after the next House election in 1990.”

Wertheimer said the pay increase is justified because many public officials around the country make more money than members of Congress.

The ethics package, which represents the culmination of many years of lobbying by Common Cause, would by 1991 prohibit members of Congress from pocketing honorariums received for speeches to special interest groups. Until then, each member would be limited to accepting $26,850 in honorariums, the current limit.

Nader rejected the view among members of Congress that the pay increase is necessary to get them to vote for an ethics package. “I don’t believe the House of Representatives should say to the American people: ‘We will stop doing unethical things for a 33% pay hike,’ ” he said.

Congress should “subject itself to a process of public humility” by rejecting the pay hike because it has presided for the last nine years over a mammoth federal deficit, Nader said.

He noted that members of Congress already earn enough to put them in the top 1% of all wage earners in the United States, and he attributed their desire for more money to “a super-rich mentality” that they adopt by socializing with wealthy representatives of special interests.

“Members of Congress are in the public services, not in the for-profit service,” he said. “If they want to make a lot of money, they can quit and go across the street to a private law firm and get more money than they deserve.”

Nader praised the radio talk show hosts for their role in stirring up opposition to pay raises.

“Some of the more hoity-toity media are looking down on the talk show hosts,” he said. “(But) they are in the vanguard of the two-way media . . . . It is the working person’s media, the retired person’s media.”

BACKGROUND

Former President Ronald Reagan proposed in January to hike congressional salaries from $89,500 to $135,000 a year, a 51% raise that would have taken effect automatically unless both houses of Congress voted it down. The Senate quickly voted 94 to 6 against it, but former House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) tried to prevent a vote in the House. House members, under pressure from constituents, rebelled against Wright and voted 380 to 48 to kill the raise.