You owe Duke Cunningham as much as $64,000 this year, even though he’s in jail.

Yes, it’s true, even though Representative Randy “Duke� Cunningham (R-CA) has concluded his tenure in Congress with an 8-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to bribery charges in 2005, he is still eligible to receive your tax dollars through his government pension.

Members of Congress have lavished taxpayer-funded benefits upon themselves, the biggest of which is their virtually inviolable pension. Their pension payments are far more generous than their private sector counterparts and are directly subsidized by American taxpayers at rates of between 50 and 80 percent. The pension formulas are even extravagant when compared to similarly-paid Executive Branch employees. The only way these retirement benefits can be revoked is if one is convicted of treason or espionage.

And yet Mr. Cunningham is not alone, as over the past 25 years roughly two-dozen lawmakers guilty of serious offenses have continued to  receive their plush pensions. According to our calculations at the National Taxpayers Union, convicted Representative Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) qualified for a $96,000 pension in 1995 that could exceed $125,000 this year due to cost of living adjustments. Scandal-plagued Representative Bob Ney (R-OH) could qualify for a deferred pension of roughly $29,000 by the time he is eligible to receive payment.

Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is on record wanting to “drain the swamp� of corruption in Washington. One step in that direction would be for Congress to immediately pass legislation that will revoke taxpayer-funded retirement benefits for any future Representative or Senator convicted of a felony, during or after time in office.

To paraphrase the game of Monopoly, felons in Congress who go directly to jail do not pass “Go� and most certainly shouldn’t collect more taxpayer dollars.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 10:10 am and is filed under Lawmaker News, Politics .