Michael Crowley gets all of this exactly right:
Amid last week's mayhem, I didn't see that Congress accepted another pay raise. This isn't a big deal on its face: Annual "cost of living" raises are written into law and must be specifically rejected if Congress doesn't want them to kick in. Quite remarkably, however, the Senate actually did vote last month to defer the $3,100 they had coming to them. At the time, senators waxed eloquent about it was the decent thing to do at a time of budget cuts, the Iraq war and hurricane relief. But evidently the House didn't feel so magnanimous--gas prices are way up, you know!--and the lower chamber ignored the Senate action. The Senate apparently didn't care enough to actually pick a fight with the House over this (or, quite likely, that was the plan all along), so in the end everyone's getting a raise after all.
Question: Why haven't House Democrats, well, shamelessly demagogued this? Given the symbolism of this moment, I'd think they could get some traction. (Not least because, as the AP put it, "Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation" [emphasis added].) Back in the early 1990s Newt Gingrich would have spent a week talking about nothing else. Indeed, Gingrich probably would have dumped a sack of cash on the House floor, or marched around with a plastic pig under his arm, or something--you get the idea. But for all their determined talk about winning back the majority, House Democrats never quite summon up that Gingrichian killer instinct--especially if it means taking actions that could jeopardize their own comfort and security (or, in this case, paychecks).
I'm one who tends to believe, in fact, that we'd be better off paying members of Congress much more than we currently do, but that's a whole different argument. For now, this silly, sneaky game of publicly denying pay raises than quietly reversing the decision just begs for public denunciation, and various Democrats, the ascetic Russ Feingold particularly, should be happily condemning the offenders.
On another note, I rarely miss Newt's venom, but I do occasionally find myself nostalgic for his theatrics. He had this Napoleonic understanding of politics as pageant that was ,in addition to being effective, fairly fun to watch, and Democrats could learn a thing or two from his carnivalesque attitude towards partisan politics.
