Who Is In Congress Anyway?
Congress Doesn't Look Like the Rest of America
People in Congress get a base pay of $174,000 a year, but they also get cost of living adjustments. That is more than twice as much as the average pay American citizens get. They also get some cool perks that we don’t get:
They don’t have to disclose their stock trades or potential “insider information” which means they can act on inside information to earn money from the stock market. If you or I did this, we’d be guilty of a crime. Ask Martha Stewart! But it is not illegal for them to use their inside information to buy stocks which is why they make bank. In fact, Nancy Pelosi is so good at buying stock, you can get an app for your smartphone called PelosiTracker so you can buy what she’s buying. In 2024, she made 54% on her investments, which is better than the Standard & Poor 500 average and much better than most financial managers
They get a lot of time off. Congressional calendars rarely require a full work week plus they take off the entire month of August in addition to about two weeks at Easter and a couple of weeks at Christmas. A year has 365 days and Congress gets over 200 of those days off
They have an awesome retirement program. They get a posh pension and they have something similar to a 401(k) program as well, except it pays better. It’s a complicated plan but just know that they are retiring on multiples of what the rest of us get
Congress people mostly fly free of charge and even airport parking is also free
While military death benefits for those killed in action are $100,000, a member of Congress who dies in office is awarded at least $174,000 in death benefits
They also get an expense account to help them manage pesky bills. It’s about $1M for Representatives and $3M for Senators to help pay living expenses. As Michelle Obama reminded us in her whiny and fortunately failing podcast, during the years she and Barack lived rent-free in an historical mansion, they had to buy their own food! The horror! Imagine being forced to pay for your own food! (And Democrats like Michelle Obama always wonder why people think they’re so out of touch!)
In 2023, new laws were passed that allowed Congress people to get generously reimbursed for much of the rent, food, and expenses they have for maintaining a home in Washington, D.C. I guess that came too late to help the Obamas, but maybe Michelle can ask for a retroactive grant for the food she had to pay for while in the White House
They get free gym membership in an exclusive gym that you and I aren’t allowed to visit
So who are these privileged characters? It’s hard to even get a head count (since some seats are vacant and some who serve are delegates rather than full-fledged representatives or senators) but let’s say there are 100 Senators (two per state) and 431 Representatives, making 531 Congress people (not counting 5 delegates and the “Resident Commissioner” of Puerto Rico). Most of them get the job and never leave: the average length of service in 2024 was 8.5 years for the House and 11.2 years for the Senate. Within this den of thieves, 155 are females, 61 are African-American, 61 are Hispanic, and 22 are Asians or Pacific Islander Americans.
Half of them are millionaires. Some are multimillionaires. Among the upper crust, Rick Scott has a net worth of $551M, Nancy Pelosi has $263M, Vern Buchanan has $249M, and Mark Warner has $246M. If you break that down by party, you have Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. The grift—unlike the rest of American politics—works pretty well across the aisle.
Who Are These People?
But who are these awful and privileged people? Well, 32 of them were born outside of the United States (about 6% of Congress) coming from nations such as Canada, Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, India, Japan, South Korea, and Peru. More than that—14%—are immigrants or children of immigrants. So a pretty large number were either born in a foreign country or had parents born in a foreign country.
This suggests—but does not prove—that a lot of Congress people have dual citizenship. Dual citizenship is legal in America. You can even have more citizenship papers than that, like Ghislaine Maxwell, who has passports from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. However, Ghislaine at one point was forced to disclose her multiple citizenships. Members of Congress are not under any such compulsion. We simply don’t know how many of our Congress people have citizenship in other countries. (They are required to hold U.S. citizenship—it’s just not required for them to ever have to disclose if they are citizens of other nations as well.) Nobody knows how many of them there are. Some liberal hothead sites like Snopes insist the number is zero. Forbes says it is impossible to know the number, but it’s between 1 and 24.
And historically dual citizenship in our Congress has existed. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was elected in 2010 and, at the time, he held citizenship in both Canada and the United States; he renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2014. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) was elected in 2006 when she had a Swiss as well as a U.S. passport; she renounced her Swiss citizenship in 2012. Efforts are underway to pass legislation making it mandatory for Congress persons to disclose dual or triple citizenships, but it never seems to get much traction.
Other countries do this differently. In Israel, you cannot serve in the government in any capacity if you are a citizen of any nation other than Israel.
Many members of Congress were raised outside of the United States. Take Christopher Van Hollen, the Democrat Representative from Maryland who traveled to Guatemala to support notorious criminal and gang member Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. Van Hollen’s parents were citizens but his dad worked for the foreign service and his mom worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Van Hollen was born in Pakistan and grew up there as well as spending some time in India, Turkey, and Sri Lanka. He didn’t even start school in the United States until his junior year of high school. He’s an American citizen, but with a very different childhood than most of the rest of us.
Same with Kamala Harris who was the Democrat Senator from California until she tried to run for President. Harris was born in Oakland, California, to non-citizen parents from Jamaica (father) and India (mother). She went to elementary school in the United States, but moved with her mother and sister to Montreal for most of the rest of her schooling. Barack Obama, once briefly a Democrat Senator from Illinois, had a similarly exotic childhood. He grew up in Hawaii until his mother remarried an Indonesian and brought him to Indonesia where he attended elementary school. His mother sent young Barack back to Hawaii for later education, leaving him to be raised by his white grandparents.
Ilhan Omar, the Democrat representative from Minnesota whose real surname is Hirsi, was born the youngest of seven children in Mogadishu, Somalia, to a military father. Her mother died when Ilhan was just two years old. She was raised by her father and grandfather, who eventually were forced to flee Somalia to escape a civil war. She spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before getting asylum in the United States. Omar speaks Somalian and frequently addresses her Somalian constituents in that language, and once she promised them that her mission in Congress was to protect Somalian interests.
Rashida Tlaib was the oldest of 14 children born to a working-class Palestinian family in Detroit. Her parents were both born in the Middle East and identify as proud Palestinians. The father emigrated from the Middle East first to Nicaragua and then onto to Detroit where he found work in the auto industry and raised a family. Tlaib makes no pretenses about caring for the United States; when she was first elected, she draped herself in the Palestinian flag for an official photograph. She flies that flag outside her office. While she is a natural-born U.S. citizen and likely does not hold dual citizenship, it’s pretty clear where her heart is and it’s not in Mo-Town.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Way back in 2015, a reporter from National Public Radio (NPR) asked Senator Bernie Sanders if he had dual citizenship, specifically with Israel. Numerous Congress people are rumored to have such dual citizenships and, with Bernie, it was particularly interesting since he lived in Israel for a time when he worked on a kibbutz. (Or, actually, didn’t work—he was thrown out of the kibbutz for laziness, but that’s another story for another day.) Bernie denied having two citizenships and then started to work himself into a huff. After denying dual citizenship about six times and six different ways, Sanders was asked a follow-up question. He was asked if there were members of Congress who had both American and Israeli citizenship.
Sanders got irate and said two strange things. First, he said he didn’t know. (I believe that; there’s a lot that Bernie doesn’t know.) Then he said the very question was offensive to him. (I don’t believe that, I think Bernie was just doing the old selective outrage deflection move that Democrats do when the truth might be exposed.)
CNN picked up the interview and framed it as the NPR reporter trying to “accuse” Sanders of having dual citizenship. (It would be perfectly legal if he did, so why would it be seen as an “accusation”?)
Politifact smeared the reporter, saying her question came about because she had read something on Facebook of dubious origin. In other words, Politifact smeared the journalist for being incompetent. Jewish groups demanded an apology, although for the life of me, I cannot understand why. The Washington Post called the question antisemitic, as if Israeli citizenship was a slur on one’s character. Lefty media outlet Vox said the reporter “weirdly” asked about dual citizenship. It’s almost like Vox was saying she asked Bernie this question using a Russian accent while dressed as Natasha from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. She didn’t ask weirdly. Nothing was weird about the interview.
But at the end of the day, the NPR interviewer was so slammed by her left-leaning brethren she eventually apologized profusely and publicly for her “nonsense” question.
It wasn’t a nonsense question. It was a good question, and a fair one.
Since it would not be illegal for a Senator to hold dual citizenship and Sanders resided in Israel for a time, the question does not seem off-base to me. In fact, I wonder if a lot of people in Congress have a drawerful of passports from miscellaneous nations. She asked a reasonable question, and Sanders might say yes or no, but for him to rage that the question was out of bounds seems a little bit extreme.
Which brings me to the ironic portion of this article. Bernie Sanders should get an award for most ironic source of income in the Senate. In 2023, it was reported that the curmudgeon from Vermont earned about $170,000 in royalties from his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Now that would be a question to ask Bernie in an interview!
Bernie’s net worth is estimated at about $3M which is low by Senate standards but puts him in the top 5% of America. Actually, only 1.3% of Americans can report a net worth of $3M or more. Ironic how he’s touring the country on private jets railing against the oligarchy.