Federal judges get long-awaited raises

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All federal judges have received a long-awaited 14-percent pay raise, as years of catch-up cost-of-living adjustments were added to their paychecks, according to Bloomberg News.

The chief justice is being paid $255,500, up from $223,500, according to the report, with associate Supreme Court justices pulling down $244,400 annually up from $213,900. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges are getting $211,200 a year, up from $184,500, and the annual salary of a U.S. District Court judge increased to $199,100 from $174,000.

In 1995, Congress canceled four cost-of-living wage increases, resulting in a class action that the judges won.

The Court of Federal Claims in Washington issued the final order last month.

Then, according to Bloomberg, Attorney General Eric Holder sent letters to Congress on Oct. 29, 2013, and Dec. 4, 2013, telling them that the Justice Department was no longer contesting the court cases and would consent to applying pay adjustments to all members of the federal judiciary.

This all goes back to the 1989 Ethics Reform Act, Public Law 101-94, according to the Bloomberg report. It limited outside earnings of judges in exchange for giving them the cost-of-living raises received by other federal employees.

Later, when lawmakers took those pay adjustments away from themselves, they also denied raises to the judges.

In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in the case of six district and appellate court judges that Congress had unconstitutionally cut the compensation to which federal jurists were entitled under the 1989 ethics law, according to the report.

That law “reduced judges’ income by banning outside income,” such as honoraria for speeches, “but promised in exchange automatic maintenance of compensation — a classic legislative quid pro quo,” the court found.

As reported in Bloomberg, laws that Congress passed in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1999 violated the Constitution’s compensation clause that bars a “diminution in judicial compensation,” the appeals court said. Congress erroneously applied another law to withhold two other COLAs from judges in 2007 and 2010, the court ruled.