Convicted Felon Sen. Ted Stevens
Strangely enough, as a convicted felon and former senator, Stevens gets to keep his congressional pension of $122,000 a year. Stevens will also be eligible for cost of living increases while in prison. While in prison, rent free, Stevens is also expected to be given preferential treatment unlike other felons.
Senator Stevens, is not the only congressional felon to keep his pension. While many convicted congressmen are collecting their hefty pensions, law abiding citizen homes are foreclosed and kicked out in the street with out any job or place to sleep.
Yes, there is a new congressional ethics bill which tried to prevent rewarding congressional felons. The 110th Congress’s ethics legislation S.1, signed by President Bush in September 2007, deprives a lawmaker of his or her pension only for final conviction of only 11 types of felonies and and leaves off many others, like income-tax evasion. S.1 only applies to crimes committed after the bill was enactment.
Most of the charges against Stevens are for offenses he allegedly committed before that time. Defenders of S.1 point out that constitutional issues of retroactivity might arise if the provisions were written to simply apply to a final conviction after enactment, regardless of when the offenses occurred.
While S.1 is indeed a landmark ethics legislation, it falls far short in one very important area and that is enforcement of Congressional ethics rules. Stricter rules mean nothing if they are not enforced, and the record of the House Ethics Committee does not give the American people much faith that the Committee is up to enforcing the new rules. Former congressmen that continue to receive generous pensions at tax-payers expenses for the rest of their lives are – Dan Rostenkowski D-IL, $126,000, James Traficant D-OH, $40,000, Duke Cunningham R-CA, $60,000, and Bob Ney R-OH, $29,000.
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At 84-years-old with a congressional pension of $122,000 a year, Sen. Stevens could buy couple cases of cigar and spend sometime in his condo style prison cell without paying a penny for rent while serving his term.