The hard questions, answered

It is 0.0143% of federal spending. The relevant comparison is not to what a Member earns now but to what is spent by everyone trying to influence one: the lobbying industry runs to several billion dollars a year, and it is profitable because it works.

The salary is also not the expensive part — the ten years of post-service pay is. That is deliberate. Buying out a career is what makes the post-service prohibition survivable, and the post-service prohibition is the provision that actually changes behaviour.

Because an inflation adjustment only protects a Member from prices. It says nothing about whether the country got better off, so it creates no reason to care whether it did. Indexing to the median household makes their pay a direct function of the outcome they are supposed to be legislating for, and gives them exactly one way to raise it: legislation that raises what a typical household earns.

The choice of the median rather than the mean is doing specific work. Gains concentrated at the top move the average and leave the median untouched, so a policy that enriches the wealthiest households and does nothing for the middle produces no raise at all. Gross domestic product, employment, and index levels can all be cited while the middle stagnates. This measure cannot.

It is also symmetric, which is what makes it an incentive rather than a gift. The real median has fallen in 8 years since 2009, most recently 2022; under this bill each would have cut congressional pay. And because Sec. 301 keeps a former Member on the same index for ten years after they leave, the consequences of what they passed follow them out of office.

The honest limit: a single Member has almost no individual control over the national median, so the incentive operates on Congress collectively rather than on any one person’s vote. It also takes a year to register, since the figure is published annually in arrears. What it changes is which outcomes are worth pursuing, not the arithmetic of any particular bill.

Partly, and the bill says which parts do not. Sections 401(b), 401(c), and 401(d) conflict directly with Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010). They will be enjoined. Nothing on this site claims otherwise.

Sections 402, 403, and 404 are constitutional as written. Citizens United upheld disclosure requirements eight to one. Public financing adds speech rather than restricting it. Leadership political action committees are creatures of statute and can be abolished by statute.

Titles I, II, and III — the pay, the in-office restrictions, and the post-service prohibition — do not depend on Title IV at all. If the goal is enacted law, Title IV reduces to 402, 403, and 404. If the goal is to force the issue, the joint resolution addresses it directly rather than through litigation.

It is voluntary and it is compensated. Nobody is required to seek federal office, and the restriction is bought and paid for at the same rate as the salary. The closest existing analogues are garden leave in finance and post-service restrictions on military and intelligence personnel.

Sec. 302(d) permits all uncompensated activity without exception: writing, speech, teaching, advocacy, testimony, political candidacy, and service in public office. A former Member may say anything they like to anyone they like. They may not be paid for it.

There is deliberately no option to serve a shorter period. An earlier draft allowed a former Member to elect five years instead of ten, and it was cut: the election would have been made after leaving office with the offer already known, so the people taking it would be exactly those holding something lucrative enough to wait for — which is to say the people Sec. 302 exists to reach. It would have quietly turned the Act into an ordinary five-year cooling-off period for anyone with a reason to want one.

Where it is weak: a ten-year prohibition on all private income is novel and untested, and raises substantive due process and unconstitutional-conditions questions no court has answered. Section 302(d) is what the First Amendment defence rests on, and narrowing it would be the mistake that loses the case.

The Members voting are not the Members paid. Sec. 601 defers Titles I and III to the Congress convening after the second regularly scheduled general election following enactment, and states expressly that no Member of the enacting Congress receives increased compensation for prior service. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment requires this; it also happens to answer the objection.

And under Sec. 603 the raise cannot outlive the restrictions. If Title II or Title III is struck down in substantial part, Title I is of no force and pay reverts. There is no version of this where Congress keeps the money and loses the conditions.

It goes down. Members currently accrue at 1.7% per year of service against the 1.0% every other federal employee receives — a seventy percent premium Congress wrote into law for itself. The bill deletes it and applies the standard federal formula.

Members of Congress would get the same retirement formula as a park ranger. That is a genuine concession rather than a cosmetic one, and it is what makes the salary increase defensible.

Because a statute cannot do it. Removing a Member before their term expires rests exclusively with each chamber under the Expulsion Clause. In Burton v. United States (1906) the Supreme Court held that a Senate seat becomes vacant only by death, expiration of the term, or direct action of the Senate, and refused to read a federal criminal statute as forfeiting a seat.

The Framers had recall available and dropped it: the Articles of Confederation let States recall their delegates, and the 1787 Convention did not carry the power forward. New Jersey tried to create recall for its federal legislators and lost in Committee to Recall Menendez v. Wells (N.J. 2010). No Member of Congress has ever been recalled. The Congressional Research Service report on the question concludes that a constitutional amendment is the only available route.

This also rules out the clever alternative. A pre-signed conditional resignation letter is revocable by the Member until it takes effect, an agreement bargaining away the tenure of public office is the classic contract void as against public policy, and a court ordering specific performance would be vacating a congressional seat. Any such scheme rests on political pressure, not on law, and should be described that way.

They are the same defect from opposite ends. The money provisions govern what reaches a Member; recall governs what constituents can do when it works anyway. Separately, each has been proposed and has failed for decades. Together they are one question — whether the holder of a federal office answers to the people who elected them — and a State legislator votes on it once.

The cost of that choice is real: a State that would ratify one and not the other has to reject both. That is the strongest argument for splitting them, and anyone asked to support this should hear it stated rather than discover it.

On the money side, Section 10 of the proposed article is not decoration. An amendment granting power over election spending without an express press and viewpoint-neutrality carve-out is, accurately, a grant of power to incumbents to regulate criticism of themselves.