HARRISBURG — A somber apology by a top Republican senator and a private bill-signing without cameras or handshakes capped a raucous, four-month storm of anger over a hefty government pay raise approved by the Legislature in the dead of night.
A repeal of the unpopular raises became law Wednesday as the Senate passed, and then Gov. Ed Rendell signed, a measure that lawmakers hope will dissolve intense public criticism and protect their jobs.
Tired of fielding complaints about their salaries, some lawmakers saw the repeal as crucial to repairing their reputations and putting the issue behind them as the 2006 legislative elections loom. Just a week ago, Pennsylvania voters demonstrated their anger at state government by ousting a state Supreme Court justice.
The House approved the legislation on Monday. The final hurdle — the Senate’s 50-0 vote and Rendell’s signature — came 132 days after the Legislature, at 2 a.m. without public notice or debate, raised the salaries of more than 1,300 public officials, including themselves and state judges.
“We are here to correct a mistake,” the Senate’s Republican leader, David J. Brightbill of Lebanon County, said as he introduced the legislation on the Senate floor. “As one of the people who exercised poor judgment, I would like to apologize.”
Rendell later signed the legislation privately, and released a statement repeating his prior pleas for the Legislature to focus on his agenda.
Radio talk show hosts, editorial writers and citizens’ groups had lambasted lawmakers over the size of the legislative raises — 16 percent to 54 percent — and the way the bill was handled. Critics said the controversy also raised questions about whether the courts acted as a check on legislative power.
Much of the anger was directed at lawmakers’ use of “unvouchered expenses” — a legal maneuver upheld 19 years ago by the Supreme Court — to collect their raises right away, despite a constitutional ban on midterm pay raises. As their poll numbers plummeted and opposition mounted, some lawmakers rejected the midterm raises they had initially accepted.
The July law also sprouted two legal challenges, one in state court and one in federal court, amid questions over whether any state judge would consider striking down a law that boosted his own pay and drew public praise from the Supreme Court’s chief justice.
“The pay raise violated the constitution at least five different ways and everybody knows it,” said Timothy Potts, co-founder of Democracy Rising Pa., a group that was a plaintiff in the federal suit challenging the July pay raise law. “It was a slap in the face of voters and taxpayers.”
At times, legislators’ attempts to defend the law or repeal it were stumbling.
In September, House Speaker John M. Perzel maintained that lawmakers deserved the raises because, he said, immigrants can earn $55,000 milking cows — a claim that met with derision from dairy farmers.
And an initial attempt two weeks ago to repeal the law collapsed into an ugly dispute between leaders of the House and Senate, who accused each other of secretly trying to preserve part or all of the pay raise. They bridged the divide this week over the constitutionality of repealing the judges’ pay raises by writing language into the bill designed to prevent the state’s 1,000 judges from recapturing their salary increases of 11 percent to 15 percent through a court challenge.
The furor over the raises played a key role in last week’s election defeat of Supreme Court Justice Russell M. Nigro, who became the first statewide judge ever to be turned out of office in a retention vote. The anger also fueled several grass-roots groups that led the charge for the repeal, and one — PACleanSweep — has already recruited dozens of candidates to challenge incumbent legislators on the issue next year.
With the repeal, judges and lawmakers get a benefit of the prior salary law, passed in 1995, that gives them an annual boost in pay commensurate with the cost of inflation in the Philadelphia area, or 3.6 percent effective Dec. 1. Nothing in the repeal forces lawmakers and judges to return the higher salary they received for four months, although some lawmakers have indicated an intention to do so.
Weary of dealing with the pay raise, lawmakers worried that the time spent on it, and the bitter internal divisions it spawned, have damaged the ability of the Legislature to address pressing issues.
Democrats who had opposed the pay raise in July used the opportunity to talk about the tasks ahead, including reacting to rising property taxes, as a way to restore credibility.
“You can’t clean up a Category 5, man-made disaster overnight,” said Sen. Lisa M. Boscola, D-Northampton. “It’s going to take a long time and a lot of work. But we do owe it to the people of Pennsylvania to work together and rebuild what’s been destroyed.”
Features
November 17, 2005
Pay-raise repeal becomes law after four-month journey
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