MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Pennsylvania legislators are taking heat for voting themselves a significant pay raise in the wee hours of the morning. The public outcry has given rise to a grassroots reform movement that has brought together all parts of the political spectrum. From member station WHYY in Philadelphia, Susan Phillips reports.
SUSAN PHILLIPS reporting:
On an August day with temperatures reaching 99 degrees, a group of Philadelphia activists collected signatures condemning the legislative pay hike outside City Hall.
Unidentified Man #1: Come sign the petition brought to you by Neighborhood Networks.
PHILLIPS: Within an hour, they had collected 100 signatures. At an increase of 16 to 34 percent, the wage hike makes Pennsylvania lawmakers the second-highest paid in the nation. They also receive annual cost-of-living increases, a free car, health care, pension and per diem. At the same time, the Legislature cut Medicaid benefits. Gloria Gilman is a Philadelphia lawyer.
Ms. GLORIA GILMAN (Lawyer, Philadelphia): It wasn't so much the raise as the way they did it, the fact that they did it without public hearings, without allowing for any public comment.
PHILLIPS: NPR made about 50 calls to legislators who voted for the pay raise, and only two were willing to speak about it. Babette Josephs, a Democratic representative from Philadelphia, insists legislators deserve their raise.
State Representative BABETTE JOSEPHS (Democrat, Pennsylvania): I don't want people who are working so hard to bring jobs and economic development to Pennsylvania and every area--I don't want to see them leave public service because they can't make the kind of money that they can make in the private sector.
PHILLIPS: Josephs says she's donating her increase to charity. Voter anger fills talk radio and Weblogs. Republican businessman Russ Diamond started PACleanSweep.com in an effort to defeat every incumbent legislator in the 2006 election. He says the landscape has changed dramatically since the last pay hike 10 years ago.
Ms. RUSS DIAMOND (Republican Businessman): We have one major tool at our disposal, and that tool can be called nothing less than a WMD, and that is the Internet. We have the ability to communicate with more people in a single nanosecond than we could in months of phone calls in 1995.
PHILLIPS: But it won't be easy to overturn this Legislature. Most Pennsylvania lawmakers run unopposed. They have a 98 percent re-election rate, which is above the national average. Terry Madonna is a political analyst at Franklin and Marshall College.
Mr. TERRY MADONNA (Political Analyst, Franklin and Marshall College): Where you find full-time professional lawmakers who rely on these jobs as their principal source of livelihood, the competitiveness there seems to be much less than in legislative areas where there are volunteers, you know, the Legislature might meet six or eight months out of a year or even six or eight months out of every other year.
PHILLIPS: Madonna says the state Legislature increasingly relies on backroom deals to get things done. State Representative Greg Vitali voted against the pay hike.
State Representative GREG VITALI (Pennsylvania): Leadership on both sides of the aisle gets an idea that this is what they want passed, and they will just manipulate the rules and ignore the Constitution and just get this thing done and think that's OK. And I think this pay raise is just another example of that.
PHILLIPS: Vitali says he lost a subcommittee chairmanship as retribution for his vote, which also means a pay cut for him of about $4,000. Governor Rendell, who signed the bill into law, has denounced this type of retaliation, but he defends the part of the pay hike that ties future increases to federal counterparts.
Governor EDWARD RENDELL (Pennsylvania): One of the things the public is missing is that now we have legislation that takes the pay raise issue out of the hands of the Legislature for the future. And on balance, I thought those good things outweighed what I thought was a little bit too high a raise to the legislators.
PHILLIPS: Rendell has said all along he won't be taking his raise. In response to voter complaints, several Pennsylvania lawmakers have announced they, too, are forgoing their immediate increase, or giving it to charity. For NPR News, I'm Susan Phillips in Philadelphia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.