Outrage Greets Senate Vote for Big Raise

Consumer and conservative activists howled in outrage Thursday at what one called a “pre-midnight raid on the Treasury” by the Senate, which voted itself a $23,200 pay raise.

Well after the evening news shows, with few reporters in the Capitol and on a day when a nuclear arms agreement and an economic summit would dominate headlines the next morning, the Senate voted late Wednesday to boost member salaries by more than 22%.

Approved 53 to 45, the provision would close the gap between the $125,100 annual salaries that the 435 House members have been collecting since last January and the $101,900 that senators get.

The raise would be coupled with a renunciation of fees for speeches to special interest groups now accepted by nearly two-thirds of the senators.

“Obviously, the senators are ashamed of what they are doing,” said consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who also called the vote a “pre-midnight raid on the Treasury.” Current Senate salaries are already 4 1/2 times the average family income of Americans and six times the average pay of individual workers, Nader said. The raise will put them ahead of 99.5% of Americans.

Alan Keys, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a conservative group, said justifying the raise by giving up honorariums “is a slap in the face to every taxpaying American.”

“They ridicule their constituents . . . telling us that the only way we can expect them to be honest and resist the temptation of special interest groups is to pay them more,” Keys said.

Trudy Pearce, an analyst for Citizens for Congressional Reform, another conservative group, said raising pay in return for ending honorariums was like “rewarding someone for returning the money he just stole from a bank.”

“A raise is supposed to be a reward for a job well done. A $350-billion deficit on the heels of the second-largest tax increase in history is anything but a good job,” she said.

Of the 33 senators who face the voters in the next two years, 25, including John Seymour (R-Calif.), opposed the pay increase, and only eight supported it. California’s other senator, Democrat Alan Cranston, voted in favor of the measure.

Joined by spokesmen for conservative groups, Nader had only a glimmer of hope that a mushrooming of outrage from voters could derail the increase before the bill containing it is approved in its final form and sent to President Bush.

House leaders made it clear they have no intention of blocking a Senate pay raise.