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Invest With An Edge Weekly: House Puts Salaries on the Line
Note his passing allusion to “Constitutional concerns.” Satisfying as the idea may seem, suspending members’ pay would blatantly violate the most recent amendment, the 27th Amendment, which ensures that changes to lawmakers’ salaries cannot take effect until a new Congress convenes; the purpose of this is to prevent members from voting themselves a pay raise. (Of course, members can vote future Congresses a pay raise or reduction, knowing that most of them will be reelected.)
It's fun to snicker about such things but what has happened is that the people wasting time on this stuff are playing to the crowd and not adding value to the operation of the government. Are we going to have a government where individual legislative houses, courts, and executive spend all their time passing laws about each other rather than working on bills for the nation? This is especially true in this case since the branch doing this is the most dysfunctional and unproductive of them all.
Comments
Here's one source of $$ that won't stop. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/mems.php
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/264230/what-stops-us-suspending-congress-pay-er-constitution