It seems we elect people to jobs in Congress that they don’t really have to do.
There was a time when members of Congress had to work at their jobs. There was no staff for individual members in the beginning. When Davy Crockett was in the House of Representatives from Tennessee, he had no staff. He did his own thinking and correspondence.
Serving from 1827-1831 and 1833-1835 he was his own man — much like today’s John Fetterman, D-Pa.
Crockett broke the rules for expected attire, refusing to don frilly shirts, top coats and knickers in favor of buckskin pants and jackets, and possibly a raccoon-skin hat. Fetterman prefers hoodies and athletic shorts to the button-down shirts and pin-striped suits — but we digress.
The only clerical help congressmen and senators had was from those employed by committees of Congress, unless they personally funded a small staff.
Now there’s a thought. Let’s have them fund their own staff with campaign funds. That would add more to the economy than just buying television ads with their money. They would actually have to pay payroll taxes just like everyone else who has employees. …But we digress.
It was long after the Civil War, 1883 in fact, before the House of Representatives first approved personal staff for its members. In 1884 the Senate authorized personal clerks for all members. In 1886 the first full-time clerk with an annual salary was authorized and by 1893, all Senate personal staff were made permanent employees.
A hundred years later, in 2000, there were approximately 11,692 personal staff, 2,492 committee staff, 274 leadership staff 5,034 institutional staff, 3,500 Government Accountability Office employees, 747 Congressional Research Service and 232 Congressional Budget Office employees.
With these figures, which come from Wikipedia, that makes 23,944 employees doing the work of our 535 elected representatives. That’s an average of 45 employees needed to do the work of our elected legislators. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Each U.S. Senator gets a budget of between $4.29 million and $6.62 million for official personnel and office expenses, according to Congress.gov. The amount depends on the population of the state the senator represents. California, Florida and New York are in the $6 million range. The average is $4.66 million per senator, and there are 100 of those folks.
On the House side, each member gets a Member’s Representational Allowance (MRA) of between $1.84 million and $2.08 million for an average of $1.92 million per congressperson. There are 435 of those.
Senators can hire as many individuals as their budget allows. House members are limited to 18 permanent employees and up to four more employees if they are part-time, interns, shared or temporary employees.
You see, basically all the elected Senators and Congressmen have to do , at their discretion, is show up to vote, attend committee meetings, be in front of television cameras, and campaign for re-election. The first three things are optional. Campaigning for re-election is mandatory.
According to Gov.Track.us, some lawmakers, particularly freshmen or those in leadership, go through an entire session without an original thought acting as a primary sponsor for a new bill.
And at one congresswoman in 2024 didn’t participate 61.2% of the votes.
The staff does the real work, if there is any. They get coffee, tea or water when needed. They do research, get any proposed bills ready, respond at their discretion to constituents, answer the office phone, they chauffeur the royal elected, and coordinate his/her/they schedule. When a member shows up for a televised committee hearing, you’ll notice members of his staff over each shoulder, ready to answer any whim.
To do this “work” the elected members of Congress are paid a base salary of $174,000, which has not increased since 2009. A majority of the members have consistently voted to block automatic increases since that year. Is that enough? Probably, since the president’s salary is $400,000 and he’s got tons more responsibility.
A group of current and former senators and representatives, however, are suing — in a suit in federal court that was filed in 2024 — to force pay raises and secure over $69 million in back pay. They claim Congress’ voting to block automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments since 1994 violates the 27th Amendment, claiming they are entitled to the increases. Automatic pay increases were voted into law in 1989.
This year, if it hadn’t been blocked, the members would have gotten a 3.2% increase. Obviously the cost-of-living calculation is different for Congress than for those on Social Security, who only received a 2.8% increase this year.
But, let’s look at the 27th Amendment.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
The founding principal of paying legislators goes back to the “ancient practice” of the British House of Common’s of paying legislators for their services. As confirmed by Justice Joseph Story, a Supreme Court Associate Justice from 1812 to his death in 1845, compensating legislators had a long history.
According to Constitution Annotated, an analysis and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, paying the lawmakers was purposed “to ensure that a pool of talented people from all economic backgrounds would serve as legislators and to reduce the potential for corruption that might result if legislators received compensation from other sources.”
A lofty purpose it was, but the outcome, observed 250 years later, would be considered a tragic failure.
A group of delegates to the Federal Convention thought the Constitution should “fix” salaries for Members of Congress. But James Madison, later President Madison, argued “that it would be ‘an indecent thing’ to permit Members of Congress to ‘regulate their own wages.’”
Early in the first Congress the legislators placed a high priority on their compensation package. Not much has changed in 250 years.
In attempt to prevent runaway salary increases voted themselves by sitting members, a resolution was proposed to revise the Congressional Compensation Clause to include “no law varying the compensation last ascertained shall operate before the next ensuing election of Representatives.”
Madison, a Virginia congressman at the time, explained the need for this amendment:
He said, although it was unlikely that Congress would abuse its power when determining its compensation, there was nonetheless “a seeming impropriety in leaving any set of men without control to put their hand into the public coffers, to take out money to put in their pockets.”
On September 25, 1789, Congress approved the Congressional Pay Amendment and submitted it to the states for ratification. It was accompanied by 11 other Amendments, 10 of which became our Bill of Rights and were approved with some degree of speed.
But the Congressional Pay Amendment was reposed in the ash heap of history for more than 100 years.
The Rest of the Story…
According to Constitution Annotated there is a really interesting story behind it’s eventual adoption.
“In 1982, Gregory D. Watson, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote about the Congressional Pay Amendment in a paper for a political science class. Watson argued that the states could adopt the Amendment because Congress had not imposed a deadline on its ratification. Watson’s instructor gave him a grade of ‘C’ on the paper, reportedly telling him that the Amendment was a ‘dead letter.’ Thereafter, Watson mounted a campaign to obtain the state legislatures’ ratification of the Amendment.”
From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, more than 30 state legislatures ratified the Amendment, responding to public opposition to congressional pay increases.
On May 7, 1992 the 27th Amendment was declared ratified.
So, somewhere along the way, Congress decided it should get annual cost of living pay increases. That seems like a trick to get around the 27th Amendment which basically says they can’t raise their salary until they have been elected again — every two years.
They are also saying that a majority of members cannot vote down any pay increases.
This case should be a slam dunk to uphold the Constitution and the majority’s wishes. Why is it taking so long to get to a verdict?
Following Up…
Remember in THR 121.0 we reported that Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md, accused President Trump of lying about having had discussions with Iranian leaders about ways to end the Iran-Isreal-USA conflict.
“We know he’s lying,” Van Hollen said on CNN, “when he says that the Iranians are talking with us and they are about to give Donald Trump everything he wants, Yes that’s a lie.”
We said we’d put that in a sealed mayonnaise jar and wait to see who’s lying.
We can open the jar now. Van Hollen was lying.
Van Hollen’s statement, should, in fairness, been reported this way:
“We know he’s lying,” Van Hollan said, without evidence. Why is it that that phrase “said, without evidence” is only used when quoting a Donald Trump statement? But, we digress.
The New York Times, of all sources that we normally don’t trust, this week reported that Trump’s team has been negotiating with Iran for days, and a 15-point peace plan was presented to the mullahs.
Democrats never let the truth get in the way of a good story when a sympathetic ‘reporter’ is quizzing them in front of a camera. Television makes it easy to tell when they are lying — we can see their lips are moving.
THR News… Just for Fun
Cory Booker, vaunted Senator from New Jersey, held a press conference and was quoted as saying “Donald Trump has brought chaos to our airport in New Jersey. This is his way of doing things. Chaos, cruelty and corruption that is visiting us now: It’s Donald Trump. He won’t fund the TSA and has brought ICE to our airport here.
“Get ICE out of our airports. It’s not good for our customers. It’s not good for our flyers.”
The Hogwash Report’s insider at the White House says President Trump crafted an executive order in response to Booker’s demand. Trump would direct that every ice machine in every airport be removed.
The Senate later passed a Continuing Resolution to fund everything but funding for immigration enforcement as they tried to get limits on the “out-of-control” operations from ICE.
The Republican Senators took the bait passed the bill and the Senate left town for a two-week vacation.
Thinking it was all over, Yahoo News and MS Now had identical headlines that read, “Democrats won the fight over long lines at the airport. Here’s Why.”
It was presented as news, but with a smaller type label as “Opinion.” Both Yahoo and MS NOW were presenting a piece written by Symone D. Sanders Townsend.
Townsend, of course, is a Democrat mouthpiece. Her bio reads she is an American political strategist and political commentator who hosts MS NOW’s The Weeknight. In one place on her page on Wikipedia it says she’s a former member of the Democrat Party and in another place it says she is affiliated with the Democrat Party.
More background finds that she was in involved in Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign as a senior advisor, and after Biden won the election, she was named chief spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris. She was the one who tried to put the lettuce back together from Kamala’s word salads.
But wait there’s more…
The House of Representatives have put the brakes on the reopening of the government without fully funding the Department of Homeland Security.
Paychecks for the TSA workers could start reaching the agents as early as Monday under Trump’s plan to pay them regardless of the shutdown.
In the meantime, the Senate has gone home for two weeks, so there is no real end in sight to this stalemate.
Stay tuned and stay just home for a while.
Thanks for reading. Your comments would add a lot to this column.
Or you could just buy me a coffee for just $5. In honor of the good work of the ICE agents, I think I’ll have a little ICE in my cup.