Judge allows Rep. Crawford, former members to sue over pay freeze

WASHINGTON — Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., and a group of former members of Congress can move forward with a federal lawsuit seeking to recoup cost-of-living adjustments, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The plaintiffs say Congress and the president have violated the 27th Amendment with laws that repeatedly blocked the annual cost-of-living adjustments to lawmaker salaries set out in a 1989 law.

The 27th Amendment states that no law can change lawmaker compensation until an election and the seating of a new Congress. The Justice Department sought to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judge Eric G. Bruggink of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled the court has jurisdiction to consider claims that the plaintiffs should receive reimbursement for the unpaid cost-of-living adjustments. But the federal judge said they could not litigate pay claims that took place before March 2018.

“It is unnecessary to wrestle with precisely how the Amendment operates,” Bruggink wrote. “We are content for the moment to say that plaintiffs have advanced a plausible interpretation of the Amendment—that it voids in whole or in part the blocking legislation.”

Bruggink did dismiss two other claims made in the federal lawsuit: One related to retirement benefits and another that argues the plaintiffs were not credited with the right contributions under the Federal Employees Retirement System, according to the ruling.

Congress has blocked cost-of-living adjustments for lawmakers since 2009, with the standard member salary frozen at $174,000, Bruggink wrote. Civilian federal employees, meanwhile, have seen their pay go up a dozen times, he said.

The federal judge wrote that an “unsympathetic observer might note that this predicament is of Congress’ own making.”

“After all, Congress sets its own pay, and the fact that there has been no COLA in fifteen years is due to its intentional rejection of what would otherwise have been an automatic COLA comparable to that received by other federal employees,” he wrote.

The Justice Department, in its motion to dismiss, had argued that the plaintiffs are asking the court to put aside “decades worth of decisions by Congress about what level of pay it should receive.”

Crawford and the former lawmakers brought the lawsuit earlier this year and argued they were underpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars on an individual basis. For example, former member Rodney L. Davis, a Republican who represented a district in Illinois, had his congressional salary “unconstitutionally underpaid” by $563,800, according to the lawsuit.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Thomas M. Davis III, Ed Perlmutter and Mark S. Kirk. Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration Homeland Security official, is representing them.