Bill subverts value of part-time legislative pay

On a scale grander than any Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority plan, no party state Rep. Joe Marino wants to create more swamp at the Capitol by turning state legislators into full-time employees that can disconnect from their constituents’ lives and degrade policy outcomes.

Marino’s HB 149 would induce huge pay raises for state legislators starting next year. Currently, except for a few leaders who make roughly twice that, legislators receive $16,800 a year, although adding in per diem payments and any from committee work or special sessions often doubles that or more. The bill would boost that base salary to $60,000 and send leaders’ up almost half again or double that – and all indexed for inflation.

Keep in mind that only a handful of states pay an equivalent of the median household income or higher to their state legislators where most, like Louisiana, define these public servants as part-time employees. Louisiana would join this upper tier at these levels of base salary.

Marino says these levels account for inflation since the last time pay was set and are justified so one “can afford to be a legislator.” He alleged that being “tied up in Baton Rouge anywhere from three to six months, and that’s when you’re in session” was “cost prohibited.” He felt that “we only going to have retired people or very wealthy people” become legislators.

Never mind that most legislators have day jobs, the majority not paying extremely well, and current pay isn’t a great deterrent to demand for the posts. In 2019, 335 candidates filed for 144 legislative seats, although it was more like 290 for 100 as a number of candidates, almost every one an incumbent, didn’t face opposition. Nor valid is the concern that only the “very wealthy” or “retirees” would hold such office; a wide variety of occupations and income levels are represented among the roster of current legislators.

Perhaps the loudest violin serenade should go out to Democrat, then no party, then back to Democrat state Rep. Mandie Landry, who must have gone through a box of tissues as she poured her aching heart out as to how horrific her life as an underpaid legislator is. “My long-term significant financial outlook has dramatically decreased since I’ve become a member,” she moaned, and poor little Mandie said she is only able to make her budget work by renting out the other side of her duplex; even then, she still has had to rely on credit cards and make significant withdrawals of her pre-legislative savings in order to permit her the privilege of going on diatribes about how limiting infanticide is so wrong and stumping for greater exploitation of women by making prostitution legal, all on the taxpayer dime. The horror of her having to work among the grubby masses and to save for the privilege of pontificating!

Nobody is forced to suffer so much as to be a Louisiana legislator. If the pay’s not up to your liking for this part-time job, you don’t have to do it and there are plenty of folks from broad walks of life who will.

Such as Republican state Rep. Raymond Crews, who when asked about the bill expressed disappointment in such sentiments. He correctly notes that the job asks for a certain amount of voluntary public service. Otherwise, he argued that the people attracted because of a relatively high salary would view the post as a profession who would “lose sight of what's involved in being an employee [of the people] and being a citizen outside of politics.”

Exactly. While federal government powers address broad national concerns that makes defensible a professional plenary body dedicated to arcane policy issues, the Constitution deliberately places with states those functions addressing more local concerns, such as public safety, health, and education and the resources by which to do this, such as through regulation and tax policy. For policy-makers to have a superior understanding of these issues and the consequences of their policy choices, they need to have first-hand experience with these. By making a legislator’s job part-time which encourages earning a living within the confines of their policy choices, this creates the maximal opportunity for the legislator to keep himself within the community and thereby best understand people’s concerns and consequences of choices.

Thus, it’s no accident that states in recent years that have had full-time legislators, such as California, New York, and Illinois where pay ranges from around $70,000 to $120,000 before per diems, have been among the worst performers economically and are among the leaders in per capita population loss, while the best performers and per capita population gainers are the likes of Texas, Florida, and Tennessee, whose part-time legislators make between about $7,000 and $30,000 before per diems. When more closely connected to the people and sharing their same experiences appertaining to areas of policy close to them, you have more beneficial such policy made for the people as a whole, rather than giving into the temptation of following ideology that may benefit a particular narrow class unrepresentative of the people.

If the idea is to improve the quality of legislative policy, spending more on strengthening institutional resources like staff and research would produce a far greater return than enticing people to run for office so they can capture a salary facilitating the unmooring of them from the lives of their constituents. Legislators should rout this horrible bill in its present form to defeat.