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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Ind. Courts - Linking judicial and legislative pay has led to a 25% decline in federal judges' salaries

This year the General Assembly passed a bill linking legislative salaries to those of Indiana judges.

Chief Justice Shepard and Justice Boehm wrote an opinion piece published in several Indiana papers last month in favor of the pay bill. The piece concluded:

The current effort to alter legislator compensation has much to be said for it. For one thing, those who are carrying the proposal have done so in a completely open and straightforward way. There have been no midnight maneuvers conducted outside the public view.

Moreover, there is much merit in a simpler system of compensation than Indiana now uses for legislative pay. The proponents have advanced a bill that trades in sometimes controversial perks for simple salary. It’s a fresh look at a difficult subject.

The ILB has posted a number of entries, including this one from April 10, 2007, calling the legislative effort "a non-transparent and convoluted pay raise bill."

Today Tony Mauro writes about federal judicial salaries in the Blog of Legal Times:

If low judicial salaries are in fact a constitutional crisis, as Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. has warned, then the proximate cause of the crisis, in the view of many, is "linkage." That is, the 20-year-old practice of linking the salaries of federal district judges to the salaries of members of Congress and deputy cabinet secretaries. Because election-conscious members of Congress find it near-impossible to raise their own salaries, judges haven't gotten raises either.

As we reported last month on a House hearing on the subject, "de-linking" is a hard sell with some members of Congress. But a bipartisan ad hoc group of former members of Congress this week sought to up the pressure. Former Missouri Senator John Danforth and former California Congressman Leon Panetta wrote officials of both houses urging the change, and noting that in real dollars, the pay of judges has declined 25 percent since 1969. If linkage continues, they warn, the judiciary will eventually be composed of "the independently wealthy or those for whom a federal judicial appointment represents a salary enhancement." A recent joint report by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution titled "Paying the Piper: It's Time to Call Different Tunes for Congressional and Judicial Salaries" bolsters the point.

Here is the link to the report, "Paying the Piper." The executive summary begins:
The 2003 National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Paul Volcker, called judicial salaries the “most egregious example” of failed federal compensation policies, referenced a “similar crisis” as to executives, and stated flatly that “[f]ew democracies in the world expect so much from their national legislators for so little compensation.”

For 20 years, legislators have matched their salaries to those of United States district judges and deputy cabinet secretaries. They hoped that coupling their own compensation with that of officials less in the public eye would salvage legislative salary increases despite voter hostility. However, Congress has still been reluctant to increase its salaries (compared to, say, average worker wage gains). Thus, linkage has not produced the benefits legislators anticipated for their own salaries, and at the same time, it has held back less controversial salary increases for judges and executives.

Note: The ILB has had a number of entries over the past few months on legislative pay, and recognizes that there is no simple search that will pull them all together. The ILB is preparing a list to remedy this.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 10, 2007 05:00 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts