A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a group of current and former congressional lawmakers are not barred from recovering damages in a case over whether members of Congress are owed back pay for years of suppressed cost-of-living increases.
The lawmakers’ legal team has argued that Congress and the president have violated the 27th Amendment with laws that repeatedly blocked the annual cost-of-living adjustments to lawmaker salaries set out in a 1989 law. Members of Congress last received a pay adjustment in 2009, when their salary was increased 2.8 percent to $174,000.
