Has anyone ever delivered a worse sales pitch at a worse time? The House finally dropped its 1500-page continuing resolution to kick the budget can down the road to March, and critics have already dug out weird and costly tidbits that apparently intend to grease its skids toward passage.
House Speaker Mike Johson wants to whip House Republicans into backing this CR in order to avoid a government shutdown. The last thing he needed was for Senate Democrats’ #2 in leadership to start promoting the pay raise buried in the bill — and to pick a fight with CNN’s Manu Raju over whether members of Congress deserve increases more than reporters. And yet here we are:
NEW: Number 2 Senate Democrat Dick Durbin has no clue what’s in the funding bill, is pleased to find out he’s getting a pay raise.
No wonder why our country is $36T in debt.
Durbin got offended after CNN’s Manu Raju asked if lawmakers deserved a pay raise considering all the… pic.twitter.com/GeXBWyuFQQ
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 18, 2024
MANU RAJU: The members are giving themselves a pay raise. Do you guys deserve a pay raise?
SEN. DICK DURBIN: Well, that’s news to me. It’s good news! (LAUGHTER) You know, what is it been ten years or 14 years and no COLA? No change at all. I think it’s about time something’s done.
MANU RAJU: You support giving yourselves a pay raise.
SEN. DICK DURBIN: Well I don’t know what it is. How would I not know about a pay raise–?
MANU RAJU: But I mean, people look at the performance of Congress, say, why should we give them more money?
SEN. DICK DURBIN: What about the media? Think about that for a second.
MANU RAJU: We’re not paid by public money.
SEN. DICK DURBIN: I know you’re not. But I mean, half of your listeners are not there anymore. You’re still getting the same paycheck? What’s going on?
MANU RAJU: Well, I mean, you’re taxpayer money, I mean, do you guys deserve a raise?
Let the record note that members of Congress get paid $174,000 a year — and usually only work 37 weeks in DC. They have almost no prohibition on owning their own businesses at the same time, within the bounds of conflicts of interest. Most of them are wealthy, either before coming to Congress or (ahem) become so while serving. They have opportunities to generate income through speaker’s fees and books, not to mention opportunities for seven-figure salaries after they leave public office via lobbying.
Besides, their compensation already puts them far above that of their constituents. Their base salary for Congress is roughly three times that of the mean household income for Americans, and their pension system guarantees them a comfortable retirement after just serving ten years. Those households just had their own buying power and retirement funds eroded significantly over the last four years thanks to inflation, caused in large part to bills that Durbin himself pushed, and now Durbin wants the 6.6% bump that would result from this language, also the kind of raise that private-sector workers rarely get even in good years.
This is a hell of a moment to plead poverty.
Furthermore, Durbin’s decision to pick a fight over media salaries isn’t just an apples-to-oranges issue, it’s flat-out wrong. Not to defend the media, but as Raju points out, media orgs don’t make payroll by taxing Americans. This may also be news to Durbin, but the media industry has cut thousands of jobs this year alone, as Aaron Blake reminds him:
I would just submit that plenty of journalists *have* actually seen their wages reduced because people don’t consume our product.
Their salaries were reduced to $0. https://t.co/mrJwJtfkBz
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) December 18, 2024
Durbin makes himself look like an inhabitant of Panem in The Hunger Games with this argument.
No one’s buying the idea that he didn’t know about the pay raise, either. House negotiators would have to be including Senate leadership on this package in order to ensure its quick adoption on the abbreviated timeline that the current CR expiration is imposing on the process. It would be especially important to have Senate Democrats dialed in on the bill, since they control the floor for the next two-plus weeks. Are we to believe that Durbin’s out of the loop on the last legislative action that he and Chuck Schumer can control? Come on, man.
Not that the rest of the CR looks much better. Punchbowl News has a decent overview of the details, including the process used to attempt to pass the bill, and Johnson has some ‘splainin to do. And he’ll need a lot of Democrats to bail him out because of that process, too:
The speaker did a temperature check Tuesday with hardliners on the Rules Committee — GOP Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Ralph Norman (S.C.) — to see whether they’d support a rule for the CR.
But the trio indicated they have a host of demands they’d need in exchange for doing so: adherence to the 72-hour rule for considering legislation, as well as votes on spending offsets and language restricting the sell-off of border wall materials.
Johnson hasn’t agreed to these conditions. So unless something dramatically changes, he’ll have no other choice but to bring the CR up under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage. A floor vote has yet to be scheduled, but the general consensus is that the House will take it up on Thursday. That leaves the Senate just one day to clear the measure before Friday’s midnight deadline.
That has Republicans seeing red, ominously including the fellows of DOGE:
This bill should not pass https://t.co/eccQ6COZJ4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2024
Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2024
And this has Republicans rethinking Johnson’s position in the next session of Congress, at least provisionally:
House GOP critics of how Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is handling government funding talks are already beginning to float names of possible challengers, people told Fox News Digital.
Two GOP lawmakers told Fox News Digital that House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., were all mentioned in early talks about alternatives.
This is where the disappointing House results from last month’s election come into play. Johnson has a tiny margin of error on any potential controversial floor vote, and any dissatisfaction would give rise to a challenge on the Speaker vote. Loading up the CR with this kind of pork is precisely what conservatives didn’t want; they wanted to put off these issues for next session’s House and a more rational regular-order process. Why cave to Senate Democrats now rather than wait for GOP control of the upper chamber? Pass a clean CR, force Chuck Schumer to eat it in the final days of Democrat control, and let Schumer own the consequences.
Stand by for more developments on this CR as its provisions emerge. And let’s see just how anxious Democrats will be to rescue Johnson once the proverbial effluvium hits the proverbial fan, especially with Dick Durbin’s sales pitch ringing in the ears of voters.
