Not Keeping The Money

Several Georgia congressmen decided that they shouldn't keep their public salaries during the recent shutdown. They differed on what to do with the money, however.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R) said he donated his salary to his church, per a spokesperson.
Rep. Doug Collins (R) donated his salary to three different groups in Gainesville.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R) wrote a check to the U.S. Treasury.
Rep. John Barrow (D) donated $5,936 to the Wounded Warrior project, according to the Washington Post.
That reads like only Re. Gingrey was reasoning that it was wrong to accept money from the taxpayers for duties not performed. The others didn't accept personal enrichment, but chose to pursue other (all quite worthy) goals.

What do you think is the right course?

5 comments:

DL Sly said...

While the donations the other three made with their salaries is admirable, it wasn't their money to donate in the first place. Mr. Gingrey has the correct perspective on this.
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Anonymous said...

The US government will never notice the rebate. The other donations were pointedly directed to doing some good, and so were a more valuable response.

Valerie

E Hines said...

All of their responses were entirely appropriate. They exercised their judgment, not government's, on what to do with the money, which was legally, if not necessarily morally, theirs.

As to the included question of whether they'd earned that portion of their salary, that depends, also, on what they did with their time during the shutdown. There's more to governance than floating between an office and the legislative floor.

Perhaps the Democrats in the Senate should donate their salaries payable since January 2011. They've done less to earn those 3 years' pay than these four Congressmen achieved in the few weeks of the Democrats' shutdown.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

The ones who donated to charity didn't want to benefit personally, or didn't want to be seen to benefit personally. They seem less focused on what's wrong with government deficit spending, even though that's was the whole controversy was about.

How sad that they probably assumed there was no point in returning the money to the U.S. Treasury, which inevitably would just spend it on something else instead of addressing the deficit. Nevertheless, I find that approach more defensible than indulging in the glow that comes from contributing to a worthy charity with someone else's money. (I know the money was theirs legally, but they wouldn't face this dilemma if they believed it was theirs morally.)

The whole thing was theater, so it's important to look at the symbolic value of the gesture.

E Hines said...

Assuming a lot of things not in evidence, Ma'am.

11Alive's Matt Pearl checked with every representative in the state of Georgia today to see who turned down their shutdown salaries and who kept them.

This implies that nobody bragged about their contributions, else Pearl would not have had to check with the Congressmen or their reps.

There's also nothing in the linked to article that refutes that implication or that indicates they "didn't want to be seen to benefit" or that they "indulged in any glow." Nor is there anything to indicate their focus or lack as they acted on their decisions.

The article--and Matt Pearl in the video--do, though, have their own dishonesty: So throughout the shutdown, lawmakers never missed a check. Given the fungibility of money, these four Congressmen certainly did miss that fraction of their pay. Even a newspaperman knows this.

Eric Hines