Here & There Column 3-29-11

Automatic Pay Adjustments?

I had heard discussion about this topic over the years but like so many others the fact that federal and some state judges received automatic pay adjustments didn't start ringing serious thought to me until the recent debate and vote in the Village of Liberty on what to do with it's court system.
We have to go back and look at the Constitution and it turns out that under the Constitution, judges are not quite like the rest of us.
In the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons listed by our Founding Fathers for wanting to get away from King George III and England is because the King "made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for tenure of their duties and the amount and payment of their salaries."
As a result of this it was written in the Constitution not only would judges have life tenure (with good behavior) but also that the pay of a judge would not be diminished during his/her term in office.
This is also a part of many state constitutions. At one point in time our New York State legislature said it would not give the judges of New York a raise until the legislators got a raise......which make for an interesting topic......like if you don't play the game right and keep the "good old boys style of politics alive" ........no automatic pay raise.
An interesting note here is that the Judges jumped on this as a transgression of separation of powers, then they heard their own case, ruled against the legislature (these are the facts folks which tends to make one scratch their head and say "is this legal"), and now the state legislature decided to delegate to an independent commission the job of deciding judge's pay, and of course we all know how that could turn out.
Not taking anything away from our Judges and the best Judicial System in the world, judges are required to obtain an extensive and expensive education process to get to where they are, and to have the knowledge and experience to reach fair decisions for all, the question many would ask today is can our nation and states afford any government agency that requires automatic pay raises?
As deficits got out of control and Congress's own salary lagged, they suspended the automatic pay increase which has now prompted a group of federal judges to go to court to force Congress to reinstate the automatic pay adjustment.
This case is now before the Supreme Court (more judges hearing a judges case) and one would begin to think that government today financially can't afford to do business like they have done in the past while others would feel that if one group receives automatic pay adjustments why shouldn't the rest of us?