Another Uprising Threatened Second-Term Republicans Criticize ‘Outrageous’ Pay Raise Procedure

Republican sophomores in the House threatened another uprising against their leaders Thursday, vowing to block a pay raise for members of Congress and throwing their support behind the Transportation Committee chairman in his row with Speaker Newt Gingrich over highway spending.

The pay raise was approved on Wednesday without debate or a direct vote, under a procedure that blocked any effort to stop it.

“This is an outrageous maneuver by House leadership to allow Congress to give itself a pay raise without letting the public know how they would vote on the issue,” said Rep. Linda Smith, a second-term Republican from Washington. “The American people deserve better.”

The junior members’ support for the highway spending proposal by the transportation chairman, Rep. Bud Shuster, may be even more troublesome for Gingrich.

The Senate on Thursday gave him another political headache, voting 61 to 39 to defeat the last of three efforts to kill the National Endowment for the Arts. The House, by a one-vote margin, voted in July to kill the arts agency by stripping it of its proposed $100 million budget, part of the Interior Department spending bill.

The NEA’s wide margin of victory in the Senate sets up a clash with the House when negotiators meet to reconcile differences in the Interior bill.

The pay raise - a proposed 2.3 percent increase in the cost-of-living allowance - would be the first in five years for members of Congress. It would take effect on Jan. 1 and would raise the current $133,600 annual salary of most members by about $3,100. Leadership members now make from $148,400 to $151,800 and would receive a raise of about $3,400.

Smith said Thursday that she would try to block the raise with an amendment to the spending bill for the Commerce and Justice departments when it reaches the floor next week. If the Republican leadership thwarts that effort, too, she said she had at least a dozen Republican supporters who would help stall the legislation in the House.

Gingrich leads a 21-vote majority over the 206 Democrats and the lone independent in the House of Representatives, so a shift by as few as 11 Republicans on any issue, with the unified support of the minority, would provide a winning margin.

Some junior Republicans were involved in a failed effort recently to oust Gingrich.

In the fight over transportation spending, a new group of brawlers entered the fray Thursday.

Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican, has proposed a $103 billion highway bill that Gingrich and other critics describe as “a budget buster” because it would exhaust in three years all the money for transportation that the balanced budget bill sets out for five years.

But Rep. Mark W. Neumann of Wisconsin, Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana and about half a dozen other Republicans said they agreed with Shuster that the balanced budget plan would provide enough savings to pay for more highway spending.

Neumann said that according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, spending on social programs should fall significantly below the budget caps, so some money could be reallocated to transportation.

Shuster’s transportation bill was defeated earlier this summer on a vote of 218 to 216. But Neumann was joined Thursday by six junior Republicans who had voted against that bill, and he said that he had commitments for the plan from a dozen more Republicans who had voted no.