mo' moolah

The Congress decided that it was time for a salary raise.
Not your salary, just theirs.
Mind you, they will continue being as ineffective as they were yesterday, but they still think -for some reason that eludes me- that they deserve a nice cash cushion on where to plant their patrician tushes. Ask that useless dork of Patrick Kennedy if some money doesn't come handy for his after-hours booze, or maybe to pay for body work in his wrecked car.
There's a little detail, though. That money comes from our freaking taxes. And we will get nothing in return for it, since I doubt that the better paid congressmen would be tackling issues as the dry-foot wet-foot, real border control, differentiation between refugees and law-breakers, trading with the enemy (chavez, evo, kasstro), fighting homegrown terrorism, or that they will ever deal with the disastrous situation of the tributrary system.
I certainly doubt that more than ten percent of the electorate would have approved for that salary raise had they had the opportunity to vote in this delicate issue. My proposal? give them a basic salary of one dollar a year, and add to that according to a system of merit, as approved by the electorate. Maybe they would either work for their money or go tend tables in one of the many restaurants of Washington DC to supplement their deserved income!