State judge pay system worse than legislative bonuses.

Ditzen also wrote: “For all the controversy surrounding Act 44, I have not heard anyone argue that the salary linkage for state judges to the federal system is bad public policy. On the contrary, I think most people – including many court critics – believe it is good public policy.”

Um-Hum–Right Here, Right Here

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OFF THE FLOOR
A Capitolwire Column
By Peter L. DeCoursey Bureau Chief

HARRISBURG (Feb. 5) – You would think that in a week where we just found out that state House employees got $2.6 million in secret bonuses over the last two years, it would be hard for any branch of government to embarrass itself worse than the House.

You’d be wrong. The bonuses, revealed by disgruntled House Democratic employees to my former colleagues at The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, aren’t as bad as statements Gov. Ed Rendell and Supreme Court Chief Justice Ralph Cappy make all the time.

Cappy and Rendell still frequently defend the judicial part of the pay raise of 2005, saying it divorced judicial salaries from politics. Cappy has called this an “important reform.” Rendell has said: “It is a great idea and something we desperately need.”
Cappy’s spokesman, distinguished former journalist Stuart Ditzen, made this “pay raise as reform” argument recently, when discussing the upcoming elections to fill two Supreme Court openings and two Superior Court slots. The politics of the 2005 pay raise ejected Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro, the first time in state history that a statewide judge lost a retention election. Another 20 state lawmakers lost their seats in 2006 due to the pay raise.

I said on Pennsylvania Cable Network’s Journalist Roundtable that Mr. Ditzen’s comment that the judges achieved “reform” on this issue might win him iconic status in the anti-pay-raise movement, which needs a new pinata for this year’s elections since former House Speaker John Perzel, R-Philadelphia, has apparently retired from that role. Perzel, of course, won that primacy by saying that immigrant cow milkers get more than $55,000 a year and that tattoo artists make more than lawmakers.

Ditzen then wrote me an e-mail, explaining his remark: “When I used the word ‘reform’ in talking … about the pay raise controversy, I was not referring to the pay raise itself, but rather to the linkage established in Act 44 which tied future salary increases for Pennsylvania judges to the salary structure of federal judges. Under the act, when federal judges would receive pay raises in the future (which they do not receive often) the salaries of Pennsylvania judges would increase in step, but at reduced levels.”

Those increases, Ditzen strategically forgets to say, are in addition to inflation-driven raises judges already get quite often – annually.

Ditzen again: “From Chief Justice Cappy’s perspective, that linkage was a major reform – and a real one – because it would eliminate politics from the process of increasing judges’ pay in Pennsylvania. Traditionally, as you know, the process has required the chief justice, or other members of the judiciary, to go hat in hand to the legislature and beg – and we have seen the result of that process.”

Wait a minute, Mr. Ditzen. “The result of that process,” as you put it, is that after the residents of this state made it abundantly clear they hated the pay raise and wanted no one to have it, judges decided the case in their own favor, grabbing back from repeal not only their old raise but future federally tied raises. In both cases, they did so in defiance of popular will.

Ditzen also wrote: “For all the controversy surrounding Act 44, I have not heard anyone argue that the salary linkage for state judges to the federal system is bad public policy. On the contrary, I think most people – including many court critics – believe it is good public policy.”

Really? Let me get this right. By linking state judicial pay to federal judicial pay, this system divorces state judicial pay rates from job performance and from ability to pay.

No private employer would regard Rendell and Cappy’s notion that state judicial pay should be unrelated to ability to pay or job performance as sane, much less reform. And how did Philadelphia’s former Mayor Rendell, who always railed against having binding arbitration or judges spend the city’s money against his will, become the governor who wants to let Washington set Pennsylvania judicial pay rates?

Cappy and Rendell’s argument only makes sense if you assume judges are underpaid. According to polls, few folks outside of Rendell, Cappy, and lawyers who passed the bar and dream of their own set of robes think judges are underpaid.
Again, compare the judicial pay raise to the legislative bonuses. As deservedly unpopular as those bonuses are fast becoming, they were given on the basis of perceived merit, and the employers wanted to pay them and could afford them. Even better, lawmakers are accountable to the public for the bonuses, which will surely become a 2008 election issue.

The judicial pay raises and the federally linked system for future raises are public, not secret like the bonuses. That’s good. But compared to the bonuses, the judicial pay raises are not given on merit, the public doesn’t want to pay for them, there is no determination we can afford them, and the perpetrators can escape the consequences of their pay grab, unlike lawmakers.

This is not to defend the bonuses. Just to point out that the judicial pay system Cappy and Rendell consider “reform” is in many ways worse than the bonuses.