Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, let me just cover once again what this bill is and what it is not, what this motion is and what it is not. The Treasury, Postal Service and general government appropriations bill that is before us does not have any provision dealing with Members' pay; it does not have any provision dealing with Federal employees' compensation or cost-of-living adjustments or Member's cost-of-living adjustments. There is, let me repeat, no provision in this bill dealing with compensation for Members or Federal employees. There is no provision dealing with this at all in our bill. I think it is important that we keep that in mind because a lot of people have been saying that a vote on this bill has to do with a cost-of-living increase, a pay increase, increase in compensation for Members. It does not. And that is because this body and the other body, the Congress of the United States, decided in 1989 to take this issue out of our own hands and to make it that Members of Congress would get a cost-of-living adjustment and nothing else based on the increase in the ECI index, and that index with complicated formula which is different for Federal employees than Members of Congress because of the locality pay, but it is established that Members of Congress can never get beyond what a Federal employee gets in an increase in the cost-of-living adjustment. That is the permanent law.”