Full-time pay perverts LA's citizen-legislator ideal

As bills wend their way through the Louisiana Legislature to increase salaries of staff and elected members, the lack of appropriateness of the increase cannot be understood unless remuneration issues and the concept of a state legislature are first grasped.

One common misunderstanding, sometimes purposively maintained by the legislators themselves, is that except for a very few (leaders, who are paid much higher) they “only” making $16,800 a year ($1,400 per month). This figure ignores the per diem legislators receive for every day the Legislature is in session for which they are not declared absent, as well as for any interim meetings or activities (even convention attendance), this year at $143, meaning the base pay of all but the most negligent legislators will be, including special sessions, this year over $32,000. In fact, this is not much below the $36,729 median household income figure for Louisiana in 2005; throw in enough interim committee meetings and they’ll get there.

That this with no base increase represents a full-time salary is troubling because the guiding conceptualization behind most state legislatures, including Louisiana’s is that they are to be part-time institutions. (The above amounts do not include other benefits such as office supplements.) These officials are not supposed to be full-timers precisely because, with the Legislature in session only two or three moths of the year regularly, they are to circulate among and live as common citizens at least three-quarters of the year. It’s bad enough that the generous amounts already given permit many to avoid that status; it would be catastrophic to jack base pay to the levels paid in all but a couple of states in separating legislators from their constituents.

Some try to defend the final detachment of legislators from their roots as ordinary citizens courtesy of this increase by arguing the nature of the job is such that they should be considered full-timers. This has the relationship exactly backwards and perverts the original intent: if legislators seem now to have full-time jobs, it is because by their own actions they have expanded government beyond its genuine, essential functions to make enough work for themselves to justify presenting themselves as full-timers. The solution is not to acquiesce to this corruption of the true mission of government by declaring legislators full-timers, but by paring the size of government to make it easier for legislators to fulfill the role of citizen-legislator. If they choose not to, it is illegitimate to force the taxpayer to subsidize this conceit.

Finally, there simply can be no justification to pay ordinary legislators around $70,000 a year when at most they work full-time from 75-100 days a year. Unless the state wants to abandon the citizen-legislator model and create a professional legislature, at best this is egocentric; at worst, wasteful. Legislators must understand it is an honor and privilege to serve and compensation should not even be a consideration. If it is, nobody is putting a gun to their heads and making them serve, they are free to resign their offices and make way for those who have a better, correct attitude about the role of legislator.

There’s also no evidence that full-time legislators can do any better in governance. There are plenty of examples of legislatures in the U.S. that seem to do a far better job than Louisiana’s for much less pay. Neighboring Texas, for example, has its legislature meet only every other year, paying $600 monthly and a per diem the size of Louisiana’s – and Texas state senators have districts as populated and as geographically sprawling as U.S. House districts, yet there seems to be no shortage of people willing to serve in an institution whose policy output historically has been much better than Louisiana’s.

Simply, no justification exists for making Louisiana legislators full-timers, except for its elements of self-service and ego boost of existing legislators.