Senate Votes Itself Only a 9.7% Pay Hike

Differing from the House, the Senate on Friday approved a 9.7% pay increase for itself but went along with a raise of nearly 40% for federal judges and top officials of the executive branch. The vote was 56 to 43.

Lacking the votes to approve the same salary increase--to about $125,000--that the House had approved for its members by a wide margin Thursday, the Senate’s leadership settled instead for a raise of $8,700 to bring senators’ salaries to $98,200 next January.

The legislation was returned to the House late Friday night so that it could be given final approval and sent to the President for his signature. As a result of the Senate’s action, House members will be paid more than U.S. senators starting in 1991.

Rather than join the House in banning speech-making honorariums after 1990, the Senate decided to lower the limit on this form of income for senators from the current $35,800 to $27,100 next year. It would be lowered dollar for dollar as the Senate pay goes up under annual automatic cost-of-living raises. Those raises will be geared to the rate of inflation and cannot exceed 5%.

It appeared to be a stinging defeat for the Senate leadership. Lamenting the outcome, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said that the Senate lacked the courage shown by the House.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) accused fellow senators of “cowardice” for refusing to take the political risk of supporting the House pay-ethics package, adding: “We don’t have the courage of our true convictions . . . to do what is right for this institution.

“We have created by virtue of our cowardice an inequity,” Byrd said. “We are saying we are not worth as much as our colleagues in the House.”

The proposal originally placed before the Senate--carrying the same increases and elimination of honorariums that the House had approved for itself--was withdrawn by Mitchell when he realized that it would be defeated if brought to a vote.

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), who said that the package was three votes short of a majority, bitterly charged that some of his colleagues were “phony” for opposing a pay increase but privately hoping that it would be passed anyway.

“I’ve seen a lot of cheerful people here today who said, ‘I hope you all will jump off the cliff and we’ll get the money,’ ” Simpson complained.

California’s two senators split on the pay issue. Democrat Alan Cranston voted for the scaled-back raise and Republican Pete Wilson, who is quitting the Senate to run for governor, voted against it.

Under the unusual procedures for consideration of the pay legislation, the House and the Senate each voted on its own salaries.

The House legislation, which was passed 252 to 174, would provide its members with a 7.7% cost-of-living pay increase next January, followed by a 25% raise in January, 1991, and another automatic increase of about 3% to offset the impact of inflation. This would bring their salaries from the current level of $89,500 to about $125,000 in 13 months. Judges and Administration officials will get the same increase.

Mitchell and Dole won a series of procedural maneuvers earlier in the day that blocked any delay in the vote on a pay raise and prevented a move to knock out the pay raise entirely.

Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) predicted that the Senate would wind up with “the worst of both worlds--with no pay increase and no honoraria.” After Mitchell withdrew the original proposal and the fallback plan was introduced, little was heard from opponents of the pay increase.

The most vocal opponent of the raise was Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who protested that it was the “wrong thing to do, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.”

In the preliminary voting, a bipartisan majority crushed attempts by Helms to delay a vote until next February or to keep senators’ pay at its current level. Helms protested in vain that the complex legislation, which filled more than 150 pages, was not made available to senators before the debate began and was being rammed through the Senate before taxpayers had a chance to understand it.

“I implore the Senate not to proceed,” Helms said. “Give the public--the people who pay our salaries--a fair opportunity to make up their own minds.”

But his motion to delay consideration of the pay and ethics proposal until Feb. 1 was defeated by a vote of 88 to 11. Moments later, the Senate voted by an overwhelming 90 to 9 to shut off debate, averting a possible filibuster attempt by the North Carolina lawmaker.

On another amendment to strike the pay increases from the bill and allow the acceptance of speech honorariums to continue, Helms lost on a vote of 65 to 34.