McCaskill: Congress does not need an annual pay raise

Progress was made this week toward changing a system that gives Congress an automatic pay raise, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., says in her latest report:

This week we made progress in two crucial areas of my ongoing campaign to clean up Congress: ending automatic congressional pay raises and stopping secret holds.


There’s just no reason Congress should be getting a pay raise every year. Americans across the country are out of work and those who are working are certainly not receiving automatic annual salary increases.

We talk a lot about cutting back – automatic pay raises should be the first item on the chopping block. Yes, Congress passed bills that I co-sponsored to eliminate the pay raise for 2010 and 2011, but those bills did not permanently remove the raise. So yesterday I introduced legislation that does.

But ending the pay raise is just part of my larger goal of applying common sense Missouri solutions to Washington's problems. As part of setting rules for the new Congress, the Senate finally passed the Secret Holds Elimination Resolution, which requires that all holds on legislation be disclosed within 48 hours.

As you know, I’ve been working on eliminating secret holds for more than a year. The practice allowed Senators to anonymously prevent consideration of legislation, robbing the American people of the chance to hold lawmakers accountable for their actions and stopping the Senate from doing the business you elected us to do. It’s your government. You deserve better transparency. Now you have it.

It's rarely easy to change long-standing rules and practices, but I'm committed to making the Senate more transparent and accountable