House Democrats on Monday evening abruptly halted an effort to increase congressional
pay for the first time since 2009, saying the proposal would be
reviewed carefully after several freshman Democrats made overt efforts
to block it.
Members of Congress generally make $174,000 per year,
with senior leaders earning more, and no cost-of-living adjustments
have been made in the past nine years. However, vulnerable swing-state
Democrats, concerned how the proposed $4,500 pay hike would look if it
didn't also have Republican support, had signed onto amendments
rejecting the measure.
“It needs more discussion,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., told Fox News.
New
York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, told Fox News
Monday that the planned $4,500 bonus was simply a cost-of-living
adjustment.
"“It’s not even like a raise," Ocasio-Cortez said. She
called opposition to the pay increase "superficial. ... This is why
there's so much pressure to turn to lobbying firms and to cash in on
member service after people leave, because precisely of this issue."
Ocasio-Cortez added that both members of Congress and people making minimum wage deserve more money.
“It’s not even like a raise."
— New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
"It
may be politically convenient, and it may make you look good in the
short term for saying, 'Oh we're not voting for pay increases,' but we
should be fighting for pay increases for every American worker," she
said. "We should be fighting for a $15 minimum wage pegged to inflation
so that everybody in the United States with a salary with a wage gets a
cost of living increase. Members of Congress, retail workers, everybody
should get cost of living increases to accommodate for the changes in
our economy. And then when we don't do that, it only increases the
pressure on members to exploit loopholes like insider-trading loopholes,
to make it on the back end."
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) found in May
that, adjusted for inflation, salaries for members of Congress "have
decreased 15 percent since the last pay adjustment in 2009." Following
a cost-of-living adjustment formula established in 2009, members of
Congress should currently be making $210,900, the CRS found.
The
turnaround on congressional pay was one in a series of dramatic
developments during a whirlwind day on Capitol Hill, with many more
potentially still to come. In the evening, the Democrat-led House Rules
Committee conducted a hearing in which it prepared a resolution for
debate Tuesday that would enforce a subpoena via contempt for both
Attorney General William Barr and former White House Counsel Don McGahn.
The
resolution does not mention contempt by name. But it is, for all
intents and purposes, a civil contempt resolution. The full House is
expected to vote on the resolution Tuesday.
"I wish we didn’t have
to be here today," Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said
at the hearing. "I wish Donald Trump acted more like a president and
less like a king. But this resolution is necessary because of his
actions and those of his administration."
The Judiciary Committee, led by chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., earlier in the day backed off its own effort to
hold Barr in criminal contempt. Nadler reached a deal with the Justice
Department for access to evidence related to former Special Counsel
Robert Mueller’s Russia report, although the precise contours of the
arrangement remained unclear.
In a statement, Nadler announced the agreement with the Justice Department to
turn over key evidence from Mueller’s investigation pertaining to the
review of whether President Trump obstructed justice. Nadler asserted
only that the "most important files" would be revealed to members of the
committee from both parties.
As of 8 p.m. ET, Democrats said they expected to receive the files shortly.
Nadler's deal with the DOJ came moments before the Judiciary Committee opened a fireworks-laden hearing with Nixon Watergate counsel John Dean. House
Republicans lined up to hammer Dean, saying he deliberately obstructed
their questioning of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen earlier this year
and pointing out how he's accused numerous Republican presidents of
Watergate-like misconduct over the years.
At one point, the
hearing room broke out into laughter, as Florida Republican Rep. Matt
Gaetz grilled Dean for turning Nixon comparisons into a
profitable "cottage industry" for himself.
"Mr. Dean, how many American presidents have you accused of being Richard Nixon?" Gaetz asked.
"I
actually wrote a book about Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney with the title,
'Worse than Watergate,' Dean responded, prompting loud laughter from the
audience.
The
House Oversight Committee, meanwhile, said it will prepare a
separate contempt resolution for Barr and Commerce Secretary William
Ross over documents and information related to the citizenship question
in the 2020 census. That vote is expected Wednesday and relates to
Democrats' concerns that the Trump administration included a citizenship
question to deter illegal immigrants from filling out their census
forms.
Legal experts generally have concurred that under the 14th
Amendment, the census constitutionally must count all people in the
U.S., including illegal immigrants. Census figures, in turn, are used to
calculate how many members of Congress each state is afforded.
Democrats, by many accounts, would lose representation in Congress if
illegal immigrants were undercounted.
The Supreme Court is
currently weighing the legality of the Trump administration's decision
to include the census question, following a lawsuit by 18 states against
the addition. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking to a meeting of
lawyers and judges earlier this week, remarked that "the event of
greatest consequence for the current term, and perhaps for many terms
ahead" was the resignation of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was replaced
by Brett Kavanaugh.
That comment prompted speculation that the high court would uphold the census question by a 5-4 margin.
The
citizenship question was last asked on the census in 1950, but
beginning in 1970, a citizenship question was asked in a long-form
questionnaire sent to a relatively small number of households, alongside
the main census. In 2010, there was no long-form questionnaire.
"There
is no credible argument to be made that asking about citizenship
subverts the Constitution and federal law," Chapman University law
professor and constitutional law expert John Eastman told Fox News. "The
recent move is simply to restore what had long been the case."
And
yet, more drama remains possible this week concerning the Democrats'
spending bills, which were to contain the pay hike for legislators. The
rest of the amalgamated spending bill is still expected to be on the
floor later this week, funding four of the 12 federal spending
areas. The combination measure would fund State and Defense Department
operations, Energy and Water programs, as well as the Departments of
Labor and Health and Human Services.
The so-called Hyde
Amendment, which blocks federal funding for abortion, is customarily a
part of the Labor Department-Health and Human Services
(HHS) appropriations bill.
A
recent furor over the Democrats' position on abortion -- and votes that
former Vice President Joe Biden took over the years supporting the Hyde
Amendment -- could derail the bill. Biden last week suddenly changed
his decades-long support for the once-bipartisan Hyde Amendment amid
pressure from the party's progressive wing.
Biden's communications director, in a testy interview with CNN, struggled to explain why Biden had changed his mind, if not for political expediency.
Fox News' Chad Pergram and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.