Republican Congressman Rick Crawford of Jonesboro, Arkansas: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

JONESBORO, Ark. – A federal judge from Indonesia who attended Auburn University and the University of Alabama School of Law and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims by Ronald Reagan in 1986, ruled last week that a lawsuit filed by a Republican Congressman from Arkansas against the government for back pay can move forward, although he showed some skepticism of the claim.

A group of Republicans that includes former members of Congress and was filed by Rick Crawford of Jonesboro, Arkansas, passed the first legal hurdle with the ruling on Friday, first reported by Roll Call. They allege that Congress and the president violated the 27th Amendment by passing laws that blocked the annual cost-of-living adjustments in Congressional salaries since 1989.

The 27th Amendment, also called the Congressional Compensation Act of 1789, states that any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of Congress may take effect only after the next election of the House of Representatives.

The Justice Department sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, stating in its motion to dismiss that the plaintiffs were asking the court to set aside “decades worth of decisions by Congress about what level of pay it should receive.”

Congress itself voted to block cost-of-living adjustments for lawmakers since 2009, with the standard member’s salary frozen at $174,000. Civilian federal employees, meanwhile, have seen their pay go up a dozen times, the judge observed.

Judge Eric G. Bruggink ruled the court has jurisdiction to consider claims that the plaintiffs should receive reimbursement for the unpaid cost-of-living adjustments, but the judge said they could not litigate pay claims that took place before March 2018 due to the statute of limitations.

“It is unnecessary to wrestle with precisely how the Amendment operates,” Bruggink wrote. “We are content for the moment to say that plaintiffs have advanced a plausible interpretation of the Amendment — that it voids in whole or in part the blocking legislation.”

In his ruling, Bruggink dismissed two other claims made in the suit, one related to retirement benefits and another that argues the plaintiffs were not credited with the right contributions under the Federal Employees Retirement System.

An “unsympathetic observer might note that this predicament is of Congress’ own making,” the judge said.

“After all, Congress sets its own pay, and the fact that there has been no COLA in 15 years is due to its intentional rejection of what would otherwise have been an automatic COLA comparable to that received by other federal employees,” he ruled.

Crawford and the former lawmakers brought the lawsuit earlier this year and argued they were underpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars on an individual basis. Former member Rodney L. Davis, a Republican who represented a district in Illinois, had his congressional salary “unconstitutionally underpaid” by $563,800, he claimed in the lawsuit.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Thomas M. Davis III, Ed Perlmutter and Mark S. Kirk.

Republican lawyer Kenneth Thomas Cuccinelli, who served as the senior official performing the duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security from 2019 to 2021 without Senate confirmation in the Trump administration, is representing them in the case.

Rodney Govens talks to a volunteer fireman while campaigning for Congress in Hardy, Arkansas at Founders Day: Glynn Wilson

Rodney Govens, a Democrat running against Crawford in 2024 has called the lawsuit “outrageous,” especially since Crawford is rarely seen back in the First District helping constituents and has not held a town hall meeting anywhere in Eastern Arkansas in 11 or 12 years.

Crawford, who was swept into Congress in the anti-Obama Republican wave that crested over the South in 2010, is known for voting for tax cuts for the rich and corporations pushed by Trump. He opposed landmark legislation to rebuild America’s infrastructure, a measure sought and promised by every president since Ronald Reagan — including Trump, who could not get it done. The infrastructure bill passed both houses of Congress in bipartisan fashion in Joe Biden’s first year in office.

Crawford openly opposes the Supreme Court precedent-setting ruling upholding same-sex marriage as constitutional, and he supported Trump’s Muslim travel ban during the height of the Covid pandemic, which critics attacked as a racist act by the White House.

Crawford also engaged in the conspiracy to overthrow the legal results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lost to Joe Biden, certified by Congress under the leadership of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence as president of the Senate, on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, after the violent mob threatening to hang him was finally removed from the building by the Capitol and Metro police and the National Guard, when they finally arrived – with no word from Trump.

In December 2020, Crawford was one of 126 Republican members of the House who signed an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the U.S. Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. The court declined to hear the case on the basis that Texas lacked standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of an election held by another state.

He was also among the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

Crawford has also sponsored federal legislation that would have gutted legal protections for the environment and slowed efforts to take on climate change caused by global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation, in 2010 signing a pledge sponsored by the right-wing Americans for Prosperity to vote against any global warming legislation that resulted in an increase in taxes.

And he opposed legislation to allow veterans to collect benefits for being injured in battle, including Vietnam vets who were exposed to the highly toxic and deadly chemical Agent Orange, and toxic burn pits.

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