Democrat Rodney Govens campaigns for Congress in Pocahontas, Arkansas: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

JONESBORO, Ark. – Covering politics for the past 44 years, for the past decade mostly in Washington, D.C., I’ve seen some crazy, outrageous things in my time. But Republican Congressman Rick Crawford’s federal lawsuit for a pay raise and back pay may just take the cake.

After suffering a bought of burnout living and working in the nation’s capital back in September, I headed west to take a break, crossing the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia and passing through the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. I then crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri and finally landed in Eastern Arkansas just in time to cover a little politics in the Natural State.

Visiting a friend who teaches journalism at Arkansas State, I found out about Crawford’s lawsuit and met with his Democratic Party opponent, Rodney Govens. In spite of all my time in D.C., I had never heard of Crawford. He’s one of those members of Congress you almost never hear about. They somehow get elected in some obscure district in rural America and disappear into the mist in Washington, and become almost impossible to get rid of, since the power of incumbency is legendary, in spite of all the big talk about “throwing the bums out” of government.

In his case, Crawford was swept into Congress in the anti-Obama Republican wave that crested over the South in 2010, and the people in his district never heard from him again. He’s done nothing to get famous like some of his MAGA Republican counterparts, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordon, all right-wing flame throwers for Donald Trump.

A sign outside Bryant-Denny Stadium before the Alabama-Georgia game makes fun of Trump’s debunked claim of migrants eating peoples’ dogs in Springfield, Ohio, turning it into a meme about beating the Georgia Bulldogs: NAJ screen shot from a Google image

Back in late September, the same day Trump visited Tuscaloosa in my home state of Alabama to watch the Crimson Tide beat the Georgia Bulldogs 41-34, and some fans made fun of Trump’s claim about migrants eating pet dogs in Ohio with signs and stickers saying “They’re Eating the Dogs,” I visited Hardy, Arkansas. It was Founders Day, and when I asked a number of folks about Crawford and his lawsuit, most people seemed puzzled. They had never heard of Rick Crawford, the man representing them in Congress, and knew nothing about the lawsuit.

Chalk it up to the diminishing presence and influence of newspapers and the rise of fake news on social media, I guess.

Then on the first of October, a federal judge from Indonesia who attended Auburn University and the University of Alabama Law School and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims by Ronald Reagan in 1986, ruled that Crawford’s lawsuit can move forward, although he showed some skepticism of the claim. The allegation is that Congress and the president violated the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by passing laws that blocked the annual cost-of-living adjustments in Congressional salaries. 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.

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, although he said an “unsympathetic observer might note that this predicament is of Congress’ own making.”

“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 wrote.

Govens has been carrying around a copy of the lawsuit on the campground trail, calling it “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.

I began looking into Crawford’s record, and found that 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. Money has flowed into Arkansas as well as every other state. But these stories get very little if any publicity.

Crawford openly opposed 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.

But he could be reelected again to another term in Congress, simply because people in the deep red state of Arkansas go to the polls and mark their ballots for the Trump party with a big R for the Red Republican team. Politics is now like football. What, if anything, might inspire people decide to change teams? Maybe if enough of them found out about this lawsuit?

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