Top Dem: End lawmaker pay freeze

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday became the highest-ranking lawmaker to say that members of Congress should get a salary increase.

{mosads}The House will vote later Tuesday on a bill funding operations for the legislative branch that maintains the freeze on lawmaker pay, in place since 2010. Hoyer said that enough time has passed for members of Congress to be eligible for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA).

The second-ranking House Democrat warned that preventing a lawmaker salary increase for too long would limit the kinds of people who can serve in Congress.

“I think personally that it was appropriate at the time of the recession in 2009 for us not have to have a cost-of-living adjustment,” Hoyer told reporters at a Capitol Hill briefing. “But to continue that on simply will dictate that the only people who can serve are the rich. I don’t think that’s what the founding fathers had in mind.”

Hoyer said that increasing salaries to reflect the cost of living for lawmakers, who typically maintain a home in their districts and in the expensive Washington market, would keep pace with the private sector’s practices. Many members of Congress share apartments or houses together to split the pricey rent while spending their weeks in Washington.

National rental search site Zumper estimated in a February report that the median rental price of a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., is $2,000 per month.

“Frankly, I see the COLA adjustment as not a raise, but staying even,” Hoyer said.

Hoyer made the comments after Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) on Monday said members of Congress are overdue for a salary increase.

Rank-and-file lawmakers in the House and Senate are paid $174,000 annually; members of leadership make more. The Speaker receives the highest salary, at $223,500 per year.

“Members don’t like to talk about it, but it’s kind of a sad state of affairs that we are entering the seventh year of Congress not receiving a raise,” Hastings said at a House Rules Committee hearing on the legislative branch  funding bill that continues the pay freeze.

Hastings said he was forced out of a luxury apartment complex near Union Station called Senate Square, where he originally paid a rent of $2,100 per month. But he moved out to a new building recently after Senate Square’s rent increased to $3,100.

“I moved in December to yet another building that’s comfortable, not nearly as comfortable as that one, but back to the $2,100 in that six-year period of time in order to be able to have any discretionary income at all,” Hastings said.

Like Hoyer, Hastings cautioned that keeping lawmaker salaries stagnant indefinitely would lead to only rich people serving in Congress.

“I predict for you 20 years out that the only people that will be able to serve in this institution will be people who are wealthy,” Hastings said.