LEGISLATURE Repealed raise continues to get negative attention

A PAC says it has recruited scores of candidates to run against the incumbents.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- In a year without statewide election races or much else to hold voters' attention, the Pennsylvania Legislature accidentally filled the void by awarding itself a hefty pay raise.
The dead-of-night vote just before legislators went home for a 21/2-month summer vacation unleashed a thundering wave of protest -- costing a state Supreme Court justice his seat and leaving many lawmakers worried that even their repeal of the pay-raise law won't be enough to save their political skins in the 2006 elections.
The political fallout was "an epiphany to many people around here," said Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, who like most of his colleagues voted for the raise in July and for its repeal in November.
In 28 years in the Senate, "I've never seen anything like it," the Philadelphia Democrat said.
'Monumental betrayal'
The law tied legislative salaries to what members of Congress are paid. It boosted the base salary by 16 percent to $81,050 -- higher than any other state except California -- and gave members of leadership larger increases of as much as 54 percent.
Though the law also included raises for hundreds of judges and some executive-branch officials, public backlash focused on the legislative increases, which came on top of generous expense allowances, health benefits, pensions and other perks that pushed the cost of a rank-and-file legislator to around $150,000 a year.
But the amount of the raise -- even in a state where the mean annual income is only $36,000 -- seemed to matter less to the public than the secrecy surrounding the pay-hike bill and the Legislature's end run around a prohibition on midterm pay increases.
There were no public hearings or floor debate before the bill was passed, 119-79 in the House and 27-23 in the Senate. Printed copies of the bill were not available until shortly before votes were cast in the wee hours of July 7.
And although the state constitution bars legislators from collecting pay raises during the terms in which they are approved, most lawmakers took advantage of a loophole that allowed them to take the money right away in the form of "unvouchered expenses."
"Everybody, everywhere, was concerned with how it was done. ... It was a monumental betrayal of citizens," said Timothy Potts, co-founder of a citizen watchdog group called Democracy Rising Pa., which hopes to channel anti-pay raise fervor into a campaign for the state's first constitutional convention in nearly 40 years.
Intense dispute
The news media covered the story aggressively, and it attracted national attention. Angry readers sounded off in letters to editors and to legislators. Editorial writers and columnists accused the Legislature of arrogance, and radio talk-show hosts also fanned the flames.
At a September protest rally on the Capitol steps, where the centerpiece was a 25-foot inflatable pink pig, more than 1,000 people turned out in drizzling rain to demand that the raises be repealed.
Within a month after the vote, Republican conservatives in the House were pressing for the repeal of at least the unvouchered-expense provision. Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, who had signed the pay-raise bill the day after it passed, said he would sign such a measure. The number of legislators who had rescinded their unvouchered expenses was steadily growing.
Legislative leaders, who wrote the law, unflinchingly stood by it.
Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Mellow, D-Lackawanna, whose office later said he was frustrated by the volume of e-mail letters critical of the pay raise, responded to one man by telling him to "get a life."
House Speaker John M. Perzel, R-Philadelphia, addressing the Republican State Committee in September, said the law brought legislative salaries into line with the private sector, where he claimed immigrant farm workers in Lancaster County made $55,000 a year milking cows. Farmers were quick to refute Perzel's assertion.
Consequences
But the rank and file remained under fire back home, and internal polling results remained stubbornly negative. Leaders faced mounting pressure to allow votes on whether the entire law should be repealed.
When the initial votes were finally taken in early November on competing House and Senate bills that differed only in detail, the pro-repeal tally was nearly unanimous.
A few days later, in the Nov. 8 election, voters denied Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro a second 10-year term on the state's highest court. Justice Sandra Schultz Newman won another term, but only narrowly.
Citizen groups that led opposition to the pay raise turned the normally mundane "retention" elections -- up-or-down votes on whether a judge should serve another term -- into referendums on the pay-raise issue. They cited the court's 1986 precedent-setting ruling that upheld the legality of unvouchered expenses and Chief Justice Ralph Cappy's role in shaping the law that provided judges the higher salaries he has long sought.
On Nov. 16 -- 132 days after it was passed -- the pay-raise law was repealed.
New challenges
For legislators seeking re-election, it may be a difficult memory to erase.
A new political-action committee called PACleanSweep claims to have already recruited scores of candidates to run against incumbent legislators on the pay-raise issue in next year's elections.
And despite the dismissal of a state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the pay-raise law, a separate challenge filed by a coalition of good-government groups is pending in federal court in Harrisburg. Meanwhile, judges across the state have filed at least three lawsuits challenging the law's repeal; they contend the action violated a constitutional provision preventing judicial salaries from being cut unless the reduction is applied "generally to all salaried officers of the commonwealth."
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