Stop rewarding crooked politicians
Let me get this straight -- our tax dollars are funding fat pensions for convicted congressmen?
Lawmakers who have been convicted of serious crimes keep collecting the payments?
Duke Cunningham can get a pension from Congress while he is in prison .. is already collecting $64,000 a year while in prison?
Bob Ney can get a pension from Congress while he is in prison? $29,000 a year after age 60?
Dan Rostenkowski is getting a pension from Congress after he did 15 months in prison? $125,000 a year?
James Traficant is serving eight years in a Minnesota prison and gets an estimated $40,000 pension?
David Durenberger pleaded guilty to fraud, served a year's probation and still receives an estimated $86,000 a year?
And if former Congressman Foley ends up being convicted in connection with his lewd Internet exchanges with minors, he will still get his $32,000 a-year pension?
And, yes, the amount grows with the cost of living each year. According to the National Taxpayers Union, in the last 25 years, 20 law-breaking congressmen went on to still get federal pension benefits.
That's crazy .. they should be stripped of pension benefits the minute they're convicted of breaking the law!
Why isn't there a law? Why are they still getting our hard-earned tax dollars? Don't lawmakers have any shame?
Republican Congressman Mark Kirk drafted a bill in Congress last May. He had 24 other representatives sponsor it too. It would have been a good start at revoking the pensions of convicted politicians .. but he found out stripping retirement money from criminal members is not all that easy.
Things just don't work that way in Washington. Maybe members of Congress worry about their own pensions .. what would happen if they were ever charged with a crime.
Kirk's bill started off with 21 felonies that would revoke a pension .. soon it was whittled down to just three and it passed the House. Then the bill went over to the Senate, where it sat and it sat .. until it died.
Seems the Senate had its own bill last year, Senate Bill 2268, pushed by Democratic senators John Kerry and Ken Salazar. It singled out five felonies dealing with public money and bribery that would have revoked pensions. It got sent to a committee, didn't even get a vote, and died.
Who killed it?
That's difficult to tell .. because the system makes it so easy to kill and not to pass a bill. It goes to a subcommittee .. it gets puts over in this to-do pile .. it sits in that to-do pile .. nobody does anything about it .. and then the session ends and the bill is killed.
And leaves no fingerprints. Nobody does anything actively to kill the bill. It just dies. It looks like this is exactly what they want to happen .. they just don't want to pass these bills. So they just do nothing and nothing happens...
Fiscally, it's nothing but chump change .. about a million a year, a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month .. but ethically it means everything to the American people.
Read about it here:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/03/congressional.pensions/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
And maybe if enough voters complain to their congresscritters.......
