Audubon Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Iowa) 1894-1925, 1894-07-05
ENOUGH TO TAKE ONES BREATH.
Senatorial Extravaganza Unparalleled In the
Nations History.

Nations History.
This economical administration in
its two branches of congress is costing
the country about 100000 year for
its individual expenses. The house,
with 800 members, costs the people
considerably more than $4,000, 300 per
annum. But it is the senate that bears
the palm for expenditures in its own
behalf-expenditures the amount of
which is enough to take the breath
away; expenditures SO outrageous and
indefensible that it seems almost in
creditable for the men who are plung
ing their hands so deep in the public
pocket to show themselves with un-
covered faces.
The house, with its 365 members,
takes $4150O0 per annum to pay its
employees. The senate with eighty
eight members has taken $41S,0OO for
this year for the same purpose, and as
it constantly increases its filching, next
year it will no doubt take more. 1t re-
quires $4,000 to pay the mileage of
members of the house, but the senate
cannot get along with less than $45, 900
annually for the same purpose. In all
probability there are not more than
half dozen of its members who do
not travel OH railroad passes and coolly
drop the money which belongs to the
people into their wallets.
The house contents itself with fifty
seven committees, third of which
at least are of no use, but the senate
cannot get along with less than sixty.
The reason for so many committees is
simply because the chairman has then
private room for his use and that Of
his friends and clerk to attend to his
private business and that without amy
cost to himself The titles of some of
these committees are highly amusing.
When ingenuity was finally exhausted
III deyising names for committees, and
the list had grown TO sixty for body
of eighty eight men. 1t might have
been supposed there would come halt
but oh, no. The bull was taken by
the horns, and the senators for whom
no committee names could be found
were voted clerks anyway. And so it
is that every member of the senate has
a clerk of his own, at his individual
beck and call, with no drain upon his
private purse therefor. The clerks,
messengers and employees of one kind
and another around the senate wings
of the capitol are as thick as flies
around a sugar barrel.
Each senator does not cost the coun-
try less than $4,000 per annum. In
other words each one gets $4,000 for
wages, and it is much higher wages
than the majority of them are worth,
and, in addition, some $1,000 more to
provide him with clerks and walters to
minister to his comfort generally
while he lives and pay his funeral ex-
penses when he dies.
Many thousands of dollars are spent
every year in the summer junkets of
senators, cotton up uuder the guise of
special committees to make bogus in
quiries and Investigations. Pullman
palace cars and first-claSs watering
place hotel bills figure very largely in
this species of legislative pastime.
A very few years since it was found
there was not space enough in the cap
itol for senators who insisted upon
haying rooms for their own private ac-
commodation. The house was delud-
ed into giving its consent to the pur-
chase of the Maltby building, a large
apartment house under the shadow of
the capitol The promise was held out
to the house that it should share the
additional accommodations. But the
house never got foothold in the
building. BY an act Of grand larceny,
unparalleled, the senate took absolute
possession, and when the house groWl-
ed and rumbled, simply said: "What
are you going to do about it?' 1t has
been fitted up in the most luxurious
style. Magnificent clocks of onyx have
been put into the rooms, and staff OF
some twenty employees more or less,
have been put in charge at most re-
munerative wages, and senators can
step across the way from their onerous
legislative duties to find themselves
rest in the midst of oriental luxury and
elegance Louis Globe Democrat.