As has become routine at years' end, and faced with the threat of a partial government shutdown, Congress attempted this week to pass a bloated spending bill that, in addition to extending current levels of federal funding for the next few months, included numerous costly and unrelated provisions, some of which are quite controversial.

Among the many add-ons hidden within the spending bill was an inflation-linked proposed pay raise for members of Congress, according to the Washington Examiner.

If passed, it would be the first pay raise for federal lawmakers since 2009, when their salaries were frozen due to growing public backlash against the annual cost-of-living increases they were receiving.

Proposed pay raise for lawmakers included in spending bill

The Examiner noted that since 2009, members of Congress have received an annual starting salary of $174,000 -- members in leadership positions earn more on top of that -- but, per the Congressional Research Service, should be receiving $243,300 if the annual pay raises had continued.

Tucked away inside the spending bill that was unveiled this week was a proposed resumption of the annual salary boosts, which reportedly would lift salaries by around 3.8%, or roughly $6,600, resulting in a new base salary of $180,600 per year.

Yet, again due to worries about public backlash, there has been pushback to the idea of a congressional pay raise from both Democrats and Republicans alike.

"We should be working to raise Americans’ wages and lower their health care costs, not slipping new taxpayer-funded perks for ourselves into must-pass legislation behind closed doors," moderate Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) wrote in an X post. "As long as raises and new health care perks for members are in the CR, I will vote against it."

A similar sentiment was expressed by President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance in a joint statement that broadly opposed the spending bill, and criticized in part, "This bill would also give Congress a pay increase while many Americans are struggling this Christmas."

Legimitate reasons why Congress should get a raise

Not everyone is afraid to express their support for a congressional pay raise, however, according to Newsweek, and some have even offered compelling arguments for why members of Congress should receive regular boosts in their salaries.

"Failing to pay adequate compensation leads to individuals treating a position is a stepping stone -- they do it and tolerate it for a short time and then leap to an easier and better-paid position," American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Kevin Kosar explained to the outlet. "Members of Congress do that all the time. And that, unfortunately, means that we voters get a legislature that is filled with freshly arrived amateurs who are easy prey for lobbyists."

Kosar noted that federal lawmakers need to spend "lengthy time on the job" to accumulate sufficient experience to do the job right, as well as that they often have to sustain living expenses for dual residences in both their home district and the "exceedingly pricy" Washington D.C. area.

"And they work a lot of hours and every day have people and politicos trashing them online," he added. "Meanwhile, graduates of law schools earn way more than that when they join big law firms to work on niche corporate issues."

Do we want to be governed by millionaires, the unskilled, and the corrupt?

Another supporter of congressional pay raises, per Newsweek, is former conservative South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney, who suggested in a recent op-ed that a continued freeze of lawmakers' salaries would "end up with only millionaires and the otherwise unemployable running the country," and explained, "Look at it this way: the people you are going to get today are often either people who either don't need the money or would not be able to make more than $174,000 doing anything else."

Expressing a similar sentiment from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, albeit back in 2019, was progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who argued in a tweet at that time, "Voting against cost of living increases for members of Congress may sound nice, but doing so only increases pressure on them to keep dark money loopholes open. This makes campaign finance reform *harder*."