Btw, look who stiffed 'em:
"Members of Congress get their COLA (cost-of-living allowance) automatically - $4,700 for 2009 - but they refused to authorize the same 2.8 percent bump for judges"
Oh, is that a poke in the pooper or what?
You want this bucket of tar or the feather bag, judge?
"Federal judges press their case for salary increases; Pay far behind private sector compensation" by Mark Sherman, Associated Press | December 27, 2008
WASHINGTON - Earlier this year, Martin Jenkins took what looked like a step down the career ladder. Jenkins traded his lifetime appointment as a federal trial judge for a seat on a California state appeals court.
In his new job, Jenkins must periodically face the voters, but he reaped one immediate benefit, a 20 percent jump in his annual salary. The case highlights what Chief Justice John Roberts and many other federal judges have identified as an emerging crisis: the failure to pay judges enough to keep them on the job and lure talented lawyers from private practice to the federal bench.
Not everyone sees it the way Roberts does. Committees in the House and Senate this year voted nearly 30 percent salary increases for federal judges, but neither house of Congress acted on the measure. Judges last received a substantial pay raise in 1991, although they have been given increases designed to keep pace with inflation in most years since then.
They JUST WANT MORE!!
For 2009, though, judges are alone among federal workers in not getting a cost-of-living adjustment. Members of Congress get their COLA (cost-of-living allowance) automatically - $4,700 for 2009 - but they refused to authorize the same 2.8 percent bump for judges....
****************The current economic turmoil makes the judges' case harder. After all, federal trial judges are paid $169,300 a year, have lifetime job security, and can retire at full salary at age 65 if they have 15 years in the job. Appellate judges make more, ranging up to Roberts's salary of $217,400.
Yeah, that's poverty. You like farts in your face, 'murka?
But those salaries, large as they are, are much smaller than what judges' peers make in private practice. Attorney General-designate Eric Holder said his partnership at the law firm of Covington & Burling earned him $2.1 million this year. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who retired as a federal judge in 2006 after 18 years, made nearly $2 million in 21 months at a New York law firm.
Timothy Lewis resigned from the 3d US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in 1999 at the age of 44, after eight years as a federal judge. Money was a consideration. "It's almost embarrassing to say you can't survive on $170,000 or $180,000, whatever it was that I was being paid," said Lewis, now in private practice in Washington. "That's not true, of course. But it just did not seem conducive to the lifestyle I was trying to provide for my children in private schools and college tuitions, which I'm paying now."
Something is OUT of WHACK, folks!!
And look what they do to a good judge: Here Come Da Judge
