HELENA — Who says negative TV ads are good for nothing?
In one recent hard-hitting commercial, a liberal super PAC said Montana Republican U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg voted to increase his pay several times.
It failed to mention a related fact: Rehberg’s opponent in the U.S. Senate race, incumbent Democrat Jon Tester — the man who ought to benefit from the liberal group’s attack ad — has voted several times to increase his own pay, too.
While it attempts to damage Rehberg, the Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund ad inadvertently illuminates broad acceptance of a little-known provision of federal law that buries lawmakers’ pay increases in larger spending bills. That law makes pay raises hard to detect as they move — camouflaged — through the legislative process.
It also makes it easy for lawmakers to deny responsibility for their votes.
The TV ad notes that Rehberg, in the House since 2001, has enjoyed five pay hikes from 2002 to 2006. His salary started at $145,100 annually. He now takes home the standard $174,000 per year.
The ad does not point out that Tester, in the Senate since 2006, has taken three pay hikes, increasing his $165,200 yearly pay by $9,800.
Facing a tight race, Rehberg and Tester each authored legislation this year — Rehberg in the House, Tester in the Senate — to end the practice of automatic pay raises if the federal government is running a deficit the prior year. Neither proposal has gained traction.
Since 1989, raises — U.S. lawmakers prefer to call them cost-of-living adjustments — for representatives and senators have come automatically, as authorized in The Ethics Reform Act. The raises are based on the Employment Cost Index, a quarterly federal report on the costs of employing workers.
The automatic raises have taken place 13 times since 1989, according to February 2012 report issued by theCongressional Research Service, which provides legal and policy analysis for Congress. Under the Reform Act, lawmakers have the authority to deny the additional money and have done so nine times, most recently in 2007, 2011 and 2012.
Tester and Rehberg voted along with overwhelming majorities to reject automatic pay hikes for the 2011 and 2012 congressional sessions.
Rehberg’s vote to approve an automatic increase was particularly important in 2005. That year, Utah Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson led an effort to strike the automatic pay hike from the appropriation bill.
“We are at war, and that requires shared sacrifices,” Matheson said at the time. “Let us send a signal to the American people that Congress gets it. A little belt-tightening wouldn’t hurt anyone around here.”
The Utah congressman used the then-$8 trillion national debt as the focal point of his argument against the annual pay adjustment for representatives and senators.
Rehberg was part of the majority that shot down Matheson’s reform effort, 263-152.
Because the pay raises were part of larger spending bills, Rehberg’s campaign maintains that each vote, including the one he cast in 2005, had nothing to do with congressional pay raises.
Rehberg’s campaign spokesman, Chris Bond, called the ad “misleading.”
Tester, whose campaign has latched on to the pay-raise attack line, has done more than accept automatic pay raises.
On March 13, he helped block an effort to freeze the pay of all federal government employees, including senators and representatives. The amendment died on a 41-57 vote that day, failing to win the 60-member threshold needed for passage.
Neither Tester’s official office nor his campaign returned requests for comment.
If lawmakers fail to act, they’ll each see a $1,900 raise in January 2013, or 1.1 percent of their pay.
See the attack Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
