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Editorials
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Written by Todd McGreevy
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Thursday, 26 April 2012 06:00 |
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What would you be able to accomplish with a staffing budget of more than $2 million? That is the first thing I asked myself when I researched the U.S. Senate staffing budgets at Legistorm.com. Senator Dick Durbin is spending nearly $3 million per year in staff salaries. Senator Chuck Grassley has more than $2.6 million and is employing more than 50 people. Members of Congress, especially new ones, must have to pay their dues in D.C., as Representative Bobby Schilling only had $695,000 to work with in Fiscal Year 2011 while Representative Bruce Braley had more than $1 million to employ his 20 staffers.
The standard operating procedure seems to be to pay chiefs of staff between $160,000 and $170,000 annually. These figures are not bandied about when the incumbents or challengers are vying for your votes every two and six years. Consider that in 2002, members of Congress were paid $150,000, and that today they are paid $174,000 (RCReader.com/y/congress). That’s a 16-percent raise over 10 years. Has your job enjoyed such raises over that same time period? And when the top staffer is paid nearly as much as the elected “official,” one begins to understand that a person vying for these elected positions is vying for an institution, an enterprise, a heavily funded platform from which to dole out privileges and influence. No wonder so much money is spent on campaign races for a job that pays less than $200,000. When one has a budget of nearly $3 million at one’s disposal for staffing alone, one can accomplish quite a bit.
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National Politics
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Written by Jeff Ignatius
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Thursday, 26 April 2012 06:00 |
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Most people know that there’s a wealth of information available online about members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. But while it’s not hidden, it’s often scattered among several Web sites, and it’s hard to make head-to-head comparisons without a lot of clicking and note-taking.
Here is our attempt to bring some of the available data together in one place for members of Congress representing the Quad Cities. We include Representative Bruce Braley (a Democrat who currently represents Scott County in the House), Representative Dave Loebsack (a Democrat whose redrawn district will include Scott County beginning next year), Representative Bobby Schilling (a Republican representing the Illinois Quad Cities), and four U.S. Senators: Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois). All the information was drawn from four Web sites: OpenSecrets.org, Legistorm.com, GovTrack.us, and VoteSmart.org.
Beyond the basics – their ages and professions, how long they’ve been in office, and when their terms end – we include information on committee assignments and leadership, how many roll-call votes they’ve missed, personal net worth and investments, earmarks (and earmarks that went to campaign contributors), aggregate staff compensation, top-paid staffers, how campaign contributions break down from individuals and political action committees (PACs), whether they completed Project Vote Smart’s survey of candidates, and assessments from various interest groups.
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Illinois Politics
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Written by Rich MIller
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Sunday, 22 April 2012 08:24 |
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“It’s so quiet,” sighed Pippin in The Fellowship of the Rings.
“It’s the deep breath before the plunge,” counseled Gandalf.
“I don’t want to be in a battle,” said Pippin, “but waiting on the edge of one I can’t escape is even worse.”
That exchange pretty well sums up the current climate in the General Assembly. It’s very quiet. Too quiet. Everybody knows that big, tough decisions are both looming and inevitable, and they’re all tiptoeing around Springfield, peering over their shoulders and whispering about the coming fight that deep down, they are starting to realize, they cannot fully escape. The bloodiest of all battles is just around the corner, and they know it.
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Illinois Politics
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Written by Rich Miller
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Sunday, 15 April 2012 05:17 |
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Retiring state Representative Joe Lyons (D-Chicago) said a debate on the House floor last month was his “finest hour.” He was probably right.
Lyons successfully fought off five hostile floor amendments to his bill requiring that women seeking abortions be offered a look at an ultrasound test before having an abortion. The proposal has been a matter of much contention for the past three years, and it came to a head again in late March.
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Guest Commentaries
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Written by John W. Whitehead
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Thursday, 12 April 2012 05:53 |
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 In a devastating 5-4 ruling that not only condones an overreach of state power but legitimizes what is essentially state-sponsored humiliation and visual rape, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 2 declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house can be subjected to a strip search. The severity of the offense is irrelevant – they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense – and police or jail officials don’t need to have a reasonable suspicion that an arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband. The five-man majority rationalized their ruling as being necessary for safety, security, and efficiency – the government’s overused and all-too-convenient justifications for its steady erosion of our freedoms since 9/11.
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