Some context is needed for understanding why the legislature has a different sensitivity to pay raise issues than does the corporate media and those who seek to emulate them.

Just as the plots of the old Westerns of 1950's and 1960's could be summarized by the racist adage that "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the editorials of daily corporate media across America can be summarized as "The only good legislative pay raise is a dead pay raise." I would be willing to pay a $50 reward for any one who could produce a copy of an American daily newspaper editorially praising a legislative body for raising its salary. Such an editorial must exist somewhere, but it is awfully hard to find.

If John Baer writes eloquently in his denunciation of legislative pay raises, it is because he has 19 years of practice as the legislative correspondent of the Daily News. He views money spent on legislative compensation as inherently fraudulent and wasteful, and has not changed his opinion of that for 19 years.

He is the sandwich generation in a Harrisburg focused dynasty of sorts: his father was a longtime legislative correspondent for the Harrisburg Patriot in the days in which the legislature was a virtually unpaid and invisible rubber stamp, and one of his sons is a longtime employee of the House Republican Caucus.

I would guess he has written hundreds of columns on the theme of perceived excess legislative compensation during his tenure at the Daily News, and that his columns on this subject far exceed the COMBINED TOTAL of his columns on consumer protection, utility regulation, Medicaid, AFDC, unemployment compensation, workers' cpmpensation, environmental protection, abortion rights, civil rights, workplace safety, protection of whistleblowers, utility regulation, etc. It is all understandable: if you start from the premise that the meat of legislative work is irrelevant, than of course people should not be paid much for doing irrelevant work. I do not think the substance of actual and potential legislation is irrelevant to the lives of our citizens, and I note that when the Daily News agrees that there is relevance, they often assign another reporter to cover the story.

To deal with the immediate concerns of this posting, the view that the legislature was callous or arrogant in dealing with Medicaid is highly questionable. Pennsylvania's cuts were fueled by the national phenomena of ever increasing medical costs, and ever-decreasing federal funds. Pennsylvania decreased Medicaid by less money than lost federal funds, meaning that the percentage of the budget contributed by Pennsylvanians to state programs increased. Rendell's initial proposal to cut $500 million from projected expenses for 2005-2006 was one of the lowest percentage cuts in America, and the legislature further reduced that cut by 50%. This is responsiveness, not callousness.

I would add that my public policy preferences would have been to expand Medicaid as proposed by Howard Dean, whom I supported as his only Mid-Atlantic States national convention delegate, in 2003-2004.

I am not typical of the Republican majority members in Harrisburg.

The Pennsylvania legislature conducts at least hundreds--perhaps over a thousand-- votes a year at night. Indeed, the Senate regularly meets at night, and the House often follows this practice. House members also attend numerous community meetings at night, and do a lot of research and writing at night. In addition to doing a lot of work while others are sleeping, we also do a lot of work when others are home with their families. Those who want a regular 9 to 5 existence usually do not run for the legislature, and tend to leave early if elected.

Regardless of the time in which the pay raise bill was voted, the public had ample notice of the fact that the legislature was considering a pay raise. John Baer wrote obsessively on this subject for many months, and other reporters also made repeated mentions of it.

The legislature did not flout the law. The legislature did not show contempt for the law or disobey it. They followed the law as repeatedly interpreted by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the highest legal authority with jurisdiction over this matter.

In the week since the legislative pay raise, no one that I am aware of has publicly threatened to go to court to challenge the pay raise law. That is because others have already done that and lost. The late great consumer advocate and perennial third party (the Consumer Party) candidate Max Weiner was a champion of the no pay raise position, and he was responsible for much of the litigation in this field.

Again, following the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court is not flouting it.

There are many, many strands of progressive thought. One of them is to take to heart the journalistic standard of denunciation and distancing from anyone who holds elective office. Although I sometimes feel critical of other elected officials, I confess disappointment with those who hold to that denunciatory standard on a regular basis.

My public involvements are motivated in large measure by a desire to build bridges and tear down walls so that people can work most easily together to achieve worthwhile public goals. We have enough problems dealing with the corporate media without internalizing its core value of the evil or untrustworthy or unresponsive providers of services in the domestic public sector.

My above offer of a $50 reward for a daily newspaper editorial anywhere in the United States praising a legislative pay raise is subject to the following limitations. (I can't help it; I'm an attorney.)

Only the first person who submits the editorial gets the $50. Only one editorial in a given newspaper praising a given pay raise is rewarded by the payment of $50. The editorial support must be advocacy or praise and not sarcasm. An editorial is an unsigned essay that is written on behalf of the newspaper by one or more persons on the paper's editorial board. The submitter of the editorial does not have to be identified if he or she does not want to be identified. By daily newspaper, I mean a newspaper that comes out at least six times a week and is published for profit. This offer is being made on July 13, 2005, and expires August 12, 2005. The editorial can be submitted by fax at 717-787-6650 or mailed to Representative Mark B. Cohen, 417 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg, Pa. 17120. Submissions must be dated by no later than August 12, 2005.

Mike C has earned $50 for discovering a basically critical New York Times editorial which included the qualifying sentence "Nevertheless, if we hope to entice decent public servants in the future, we need to start offering a better pay package now."

National Conference of State Legislatures staffer Tim Storey, whose job it is to do research for state legislators, came up with three other examples. "They were far outnumbered by opposing editorials, and somewhat difficult to find," Tim emails me after doing a Lexis search. The NCSL expert on legislative compensation, Tim was unaware of any pro-pay raise editorial until he did the research. Professor Alan Rosenthal of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics, America's foremost expert on state legislatures, also had been unaware of any pro-pay raise editorial.

Tim's first editorial was from the San Luis Obispo Tribune in California, written on Wednesday, May 25, 2005. "Those who choose public service in the state Legislature should also earn a competitive salary if we expect the job to attract the best and the brightest. Botton line? If you don't think your state representatives are worth $110,880 a year, vote for someone who's worth it."

Tim's second editorial was from the Reno-Gazette Journal, which said a proposed $1200 pay raise (from $7800) should be supported and then followed by another pay raise. "No one will get rich from their legislative session. Indeed, some may still struggle to avoid going broke."

Tim's third editorial was from the May 24, 1999 Atlanta Constitution, which blasted "political posturing masquerading as frugality" and noted that the proposed pay increase from $11,347 to $16,200 "would still be one of the lowest in the country." "For the good of Georgia--for the future of Georgia," the editorial concluded "legislators ought to have the courage to raise their own pay. It's a smart investment that will repay itself many times over."

A $50 offer and a Lexis search (and my unsuccessful Google search) have so far produced just four examples of editorial support for a legislative pay raise. It's hard to imagine many issue positions with as monolithic a media voice as this one. But the unthinking, robotic, and unreasoningly hostile attitude of almost all the newspaper publishers almost all the time ought not to be followed by the indpendent minds on the Internet.

Those who value the voices of the people ought to respect those who are elected by the people.

The $50 offer for other pro legislative pay raise editorials still stands, under the conditions listed above. Finding what is extremely rare sheds a good deal of light on what is extremely common.

The New York Times editorial listed above was published on November 23, 1998 and entitled "Pay Days in Albany." The Reno Gazette-Journal editorial was published on May 27, 2003 and just listed under Editorials.

In his letter to me, Mike C says he does "not want to take a position on the legislature's recent pay raise." He notes that "serving as a state representative has an implied salary--in both power and prestige." He is accurate on this, but any public official who tries to convert the "implied salary" into hard cash or real property is inviting unwanted attention from the FBI, the Pennsylvania Attorney General, and other law enforcement personnel.
New Jersey has earned a reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the country because so much of governmental income is in the form of dubious "implied salary."

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, when he was serving as Governor of California in the 1970's, called Mike C's "implied salary" "psychic income dollars." He complained in the midst of a budget crisis that college faculty should not get a raise because they earned so many "psychic income dollars." The head of the college faculty union ultimately responded by mailing a check for millions of "psychic income dollars" to the state to balance the budget.

Mike C's letter to me quotes Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Franklin, I have learned from Internet sources, was a strong advocate of not paying the Senate, to guarantee that it would be filled by wealthy men and be something like the House of Lords. The convention defeated Franklin's proposal, along with another one allowing each state to set the compensation of its Congress members.

Mike C's Franklin quote is as follows:

Sir, there are two passions which have a powerful influence in
the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of
power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has
great force in prompting men to action; but when united in view
of the same object, they have, in many minds, the most violent
effects.

The most eloquent rebuttal to the possibility that zeal for money and power are combined in a pay raise vote comes from the Atlanta Constitution editorial of March 24, 1999:

Imagine being able to decide your own pay raise. Whatever you
and your colleagues think you're worth, that's what you get
paid. For many workers, that might sound like a dream come
true.

Now imagine that same system, but with one small condition. You
still get to decide how much you're paid, but if your boss
decides you've paid yourself too much--boom--you're fired.

All of a sudden, the ability to set your own pay becomes a
burden, not an opportunity. In fact, behavorial scientists have
discovered that people placed in similar predicaments will
generally end up cheating themselves rather than risk being
punished.

Certainly, that's been the experience of the Georgia
Legislature.

I can assure any interested person that, as the Atlanta Constitution says, legislators do not take pay raise votes lightly. That is why the last two legislative pay raise votes before 2005 were in 1995 and 1987, and why the 2005 salaries for base legislative pay merely equal the 1987 salaries, adjusted for inflation. (The 1995 pay raise kept the legislative salary at ONE HALF of the cost of living increase between 1987 and 1995, adjusted for inflation.)

Doing a second google search on this topic, I found a Boston Globe editorial for Thursday, January 9, 2003, endorsing a legislative pay adjustment. Massachusetts had provided by a constitutional amendment for "automatic pay increases every two years pegged to the increase in the state's median income, " the Boston Globe said. "...(T)he first increments--raises of 7%--were paid out in 2001 with hardly a murmur.

"Now, however, with the regional economy stalled and the state budget in a severe squeeze, the cry has gone up, mainly from those who don't like government anyway, that it would be immoral for legislators to pocket the 6.5% pay increase dictated by the household income figures at the same time they are cutting state programs.

"We disagree. The whole point of the 1998 amendment was to take legislative pay out of the political arena, where demagogic jawing about it inevitably obscures more important issues.

"At $53,381, which is the new salary with the $3,258 raise included, legislators are hardly overpaid for the responsibilities they have at the State House and the time they spend with constituents. The legislators not working hard enough to earn that amount should be booted out by the voters.

"In addition, the potential savings involved if all 200 senators and representatives rejected the raise would be $651,600, not enough to rescue significant programs.

"It makes no more sense to legislate on the cheap than it does to build roads or provide foster care on the cheap...."

I found this editorial on the Citizens for Limited Taxation website. CLT spokesman Chip Ford said the editorial was "the only one in the state I've come across supporting the pay raise." He attacked the Globe for "clamoring for more spending and higher taxes to fund its limitless social agenda," said it was an "editorial elite," and charged "they're much too busy promoting the tax and spend, spend and tax cycle."

So, after several days of research and outreach, we find that at least 5 of about 1700 daily newspapers in America have written at least once a pro-legislative pay raise editorial. Are there any more? See my $50 reward in the second post if you can find one.

Whatever the final number is, it will be low enough for objective persons to understand why the vast majority of legislators across America do not view newspaper editorials on this subject as either objective or sincere.

I have now found a sixth pro pay raise editorial, from Nebraska's Grand Island Independent. It supports doubling Nebraska's legislative salary from $12,000 to $24,000 a year, saying, "By raising the salary, Nebraskans will be lifting one of the barriers that keep people from running. And that should be the goal: to get the best people we can to run for the Legislature.

"An increase in senators'pay is long overdue. The salary has been set at $12,000 since 1988. Over these 17 years, pay and prices have gone up throughout the state. Should we ask our senators to sacrifice pay raises others get and to pay more to serve our state? We don't think so...."

The editorial was entitled "Legislative Pay Increase Plan is Valid," and it appeared on March 29, 2005.

Still no editorial from Pennsylvania still far under 1% of American daily newspapers.