RALEIGH – A telltale sign that legislative sessions are about to wind down – or, at least, that it’s high time they did – is the appearance of stories about the daily cost of legislative sessions and how many lawmakers are taking their per-diem checks despite the lack of any real business going on in the General Assembly.
An example of the latter was found in the Raleigh News & Observer’s “Under the Dome” column. It noted that even though the North Carolina House and Senate are not meeting this week in Raleigh – about a gaggle of the members having flown off to Seattle for the National Conference of State Legislatures convention – a significant majority chose to accept their per-diem checks for the week.
Among the entire legislature, 70 members appear to have refused the money for at least one of the days in question. That means 100 members are claiming per-diems for the week. There’s a big difference when broken out by chamber, however: while 90 House members are taking the money, only 11 senators are pocketing it. In part, this reflects the fact that the Senate essentially suspend its normal operations some time ago, while the House technically kept at it until this week’s interruption.
I’ve never been one to get all up-in-arms about this per-diem business. It’s not because I relish the thought that members ought to have their time and expenses reimbursed regardless of whether they are actually in Raleigh performing their duties. It’s because I don’t think that paying lawmakers by the day is in the best interest of taxpayers.
First of all, I hold this truth to be self-evident: all legislative work is not created equal. Indeed, most proposed bills are bad ideas. The Republic has survived this long without them, and unfortunately for the political class most of the good ideas in government were already discovered some time ago by people in stockings and wigs.
Make that men in stockings and wigs.
If we want to use legislative pay as an incentive, let’s pay members for the number of days they stay away from Raleigh. After all, the less time they are down at the Legislative Building, the less time they have to spend our money and micromanage our lives. Perhaps lawmakers should be eligible for extra, bonus money in reverse proportion to the number of bills they file. We could call this incentive program the ABCs of Public Legislation, which stands for Abstaining from Boondoggles and Conceits.
But seriously, we ought to pay lawmakers an appropriate (higher) annual salary, throw out the per-diems altogether, and then enforced strict limits on legislative session length (in days) and breadth (in the number of bills filed). Let’s not play any more pay games with our state legislators – it just encourages them.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.