Last year, many bills were introduced to prevent Congress from receiving a pay increase, and Congress did finally deny itself an automatic pay increase.

But the law still gives them an automatic raise if they don’t refuse it. Who among us wouldn’t like to have that sweet deal? Who among us wants to pay for it?

I wrote here a couple of times about a California proposal to limit state representatives pay when the state budget is out of balance. It was overwhelmingly approved.

In Washington, D.C., the annual budgeting process is about to get started again. And we’ve seen at least one bill to stop the automatic pay increase.

It’s H.R. 4255, the Stop the Automatic Pay Raise for Members of Congress in Fiscal Year 2011 Act. (Well named, eh?)

As before, there will probably be a lot of such bills, and we’ll collect them here. What do you think of Congress getting a raise in fiscal year 2011? What do you think about Congress getting automatic raises in general?

A deep fissure between federal lawmaking practices and the Internet-fueled expectations of the people is just starting to open.

Here’s a fascinating interview with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), in which he justifies not reading the legislation that he votes on.

He’s right that the bills Congress passes are almost incomprehensible, but he draws the wrong conclusion from it. It’s not OK to pass bills that you can’t read and literally don’t understand.

Congress and the bureaucracy will come to learn a lesson that other parts of our society have learned: The Internet changes things.

Because it is now possible to see legislation before Congress passes it, Americans now expect to see legislation before it passes. And they will come to expect that their representative understand it—in detail.

A machine has grown up in Washington over the past two hundred years where representatives rely on colleagues who rely on staff to write bills. This has not produced a desirable body of federal law, and it is not a process that the public will accept for much longer.

Ben Goddard writes in The Hill about the new taxpayer revolt in California this week. The political establishment put together a package of initiatives that it thought would fix the budget process there – but the people weren’t buying it.  The only thing they passed was the measure to ban salary increases for legislators if they didn’t balance the budget.

There are similar proposals floating around Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.  If bills were subject to a popular vote, it seems like such a thing would be likely to pass.

(So why do we gotta be so boring? . . .)

It’s never been more clear that politics is entertainment.

Take a look at this post on Gawker.com. It’s liberals being mad at conservatives for taking a jab at President Obama because he ordered spicy Dijon mustard for his burger. In other words, it’s about nothing at all, but it’s got lots of people interested.

What we do here is much more substantive and slightly more boring. We’re like the financial section of the paper rather than the sports page. But while others are distracted by “Dijongate,” you’re at least half-aware that Congress and the President will be spending about $30,000 per U.S. family between now and the fall.

The bottom line: If you’re reading this, you’re smarter than the average American. And if you don’t care what condiment the President puts on his burger, you have good taste!

California Proposition 1F is a measure on the ballot for the May 19 election in California.

It would prohibit the state commission that sets salary levels for the governor, other top state officials, and members of the California State Legislature from increasing those salaries if the state General Fund is expected to end the year with a deficit.

We’ve been following bills to limit pay for Members of the U.S. Congress in a post called “No Salary Increase for Congress in Fiscal 2010.” There are at least fifteen bills in the current Congress to limit federal politicians’ pay.

H.R. 201, the Deficit Accountability Act of 2009, is similar to the California ballot initiative. It would prevent automatic pay increases for Members of Congress in the year after a fiscal year in which there is a Federal budget deficit.

H.R. 566 would prevent pay increases when government outlays (that is, spending) exceed receipts (that is, taxes).

Here are the current votes on H.R. 201 and H.R. 566. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles on these bills.

I wrote about Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) here once before, but his trial on corruption charges hasn’t been a focus. It just occurred to me when I read of his exoneration that the news about a person being indicted gets splashed across the headlines, but when the charges fall apart, word often doesn’t get out.

So here’s our little part to correct the impression the world has of Ted Stevens: he has been exonerated.

(Do consider the fact, which I also noted in the post about his indictment, that I worked for him on the staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1996. I don’t have a relationship with him or feel any personal admiration, but I was inspired to write this by a note from a fellow former staffer.)

TPMMuckracker published a nice summary of the collapse of AIG on Friday. If you’re interested in Congress’ role in creating the disaster, here’s a key line: “In 2000, Congress passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which further reduced the already weak regulation of derivatives like credit default swaps.”

Back in October, in a post called “Did Your Representative Cause the Financial Crisis?,” we featured the Senators and Members of Congress who voted to bar states from regulating credit default swaps under gambling and “bucket shop” laws.

If you’re from any of the states listed below, your Member of Congress may have helped cause the financial crisis with his or her vote. Click on your state to see which representatives helped create today’s economic problems: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, or Wyoming.

See all House votes here. The people listed are House Members who were still serving in the last Congress and who supported the Consolidated Appropriations Act with the AIG loophole, as well as Senators who were up for reelection in 2008 who allowed it to pass (plus a couple who voted for it in the House).

In January, Congress got a pay raise of $4,700, bringing their salaries to $174,000. Not bad at all, when you consider that people around the country are losing their jobs or taking pay cuts just to keep them.

In a recent comment on our post about bills to deny Congress pay increases, for example, a program manager for a defense contractor wrote about taking a 3% reduction in salary to keep people in his company from losing their jobs.

Well, it turns out that Congress canceled its raise for the coming fiscal year in the big omnibus spending bill it passed last week. (The very last sentence of the bill says: “Notwithstanding any provision of section 601(a)(2) of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 (2 U.S.C. 31(2)), the percentage adjustment scheduled to take effect under any such provision in calendar year 2010 shall not take effect.”)

But should Congress have canceled its automatic pay increases entirely? There was a little battle over that in the Senate last week, and the majority of Senators voted not to cancel their automatic pay raises. If an amendment to strike automatic pay raises had been passed, the bill would have had to go back to the House for another vote. Time has the whole story.

So, do you accept the argument that the press of business was too much to take time with a cancellation of automatic pay raises? Or was the “press of business” a problem that Congress created itself when it failed to pass the annual spending bills on schedule? (It’s already behind schedule for the coming fiscal year.)

Here is a list of Senators’ votes on whether or not to cancel the automatic pay increase. (The official vote record is here.) Scroll down to find your state and Senators. A “Yea” vote was a vote for continuing automatic pay increases. A “Nay” vote was for canceling automatic pay increases. Here’s how to contact them and let them know what you think. (more…)

[Update: For the latest, see our post entitled: No Salary Increase for Congress in FY 2011.]

This bill would prevent Congress from getting an automatic pay raise.

Update: And here’s a bill to prevent Congress from getting a pay increase in any year when the government is running a deficit.

Update II: And another.

Update III: And another.

Update IV: Yet another.

Update V: Here’s another.

Update VI: Here’s another and another.

Update VII: By golly, here’s another.

Update VIII: The juggernaut continues! Do you suppose one of these will pass?

Update IX: And one more – this one an amendment to House rules.

Update X: And another.

Update XI: One more.

Update XII: They keep coming.

Update XII: They keep coming.

Via the Enlightened Redneck, Congress is getting a raise. In fact, they have set it up to give themselves a raise automatically, no matter what their work produces:

A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay. Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries . . . .

Be sure to note how the pay increase kicks in right after the election. For you to do something about it, you have to wait 23 months until the next election. Have no doubt, they’re clever, your representatives in Congress.

There was a bill introduced to prevent the automatic pay increase from taking effect this year, but guess what?: It didn’t go anywhere.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 5087, to prevent Members of Congress from receiving the automatic pay adjustment scheduled to take effect in 2009. Click to vote, comment, learn more, and edit the wiki article about the bill.