Legislators Getting Paid Anyway

I have never been a fan of the idea of legislators not taking their paycheck. The reality is that we don’t just want a bunch of rich people who can do that. We want ordinary people in a citizen legislature. There is also a sense that if they earn it , they deserve to get paid for what they do. There are already so many personal and family scarifies that they make to do the job.

What got me was the legislators in Minnesota who said they were not going to take their pay during the shut down and then went and got it after. The reason this bothered me was that non payment was used as some sort of badge of honor during the shutdown. Take your pay, do your job, but don’t just delay it. Or at the very least, tell everyone that is what you are doing.

For some of them, it’s been a scramble to now give away the money that they said they weren’t going to take. I guess if you give it to a really good cause, you want some sort of break. That’s bunk.

The key in all of this is honesty. Looks to me like it has just as many holes as the social agenda as many of them really wanted to get in this last session.