Cite as: 532 U. S. 557 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
of judges by 20%, a later increase of 30% applicable to all judges would leave the first group permanently 20% behind. And a pay cut that left those judges at a permanent disadvantage would perpetuate the very harm that the Compensation Clause seeks to prevent.
The Court of Appeals consequently examined the context in which the later pay increases took place in order to determine their relation to the earlier Compensation Clause violation. It found "nothing to suggest" that the later salary increase at issue here sought "to make whole the losses sustained by the pre-1983 judges." 185 F. 3d, at 1362-1363. The Government presents no evidence to the contrary.
The relevant economic circumstances surrounding the 1984, and subsequent, salary increases include inflation sufficiently serious to erode the real value of judicial salaries and salary increases insufficient to maintain real salaries or real compensation parity with many other private-sector employees. See Report of 1989 Commission on Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Salaries, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, 101st Cong., 1st Sess., 12-13 (1989) (testimony of Lloyd Cutler regarding effect of inflation on judges' salaries since 1969). For instance, while consumer prices rose 363% between 1969 and 1999, salaries in the private sector rose 421%, and salaries for district judges rose 253%. See American Bar Association, Federal Judicial Pay Erosion 11 (Feb. 2001). These figures strongly suggest that the judicial salary increases simply reflected a congressional effort to restore both to judges and to Members of Congress themselves some, but not all, of the real compensation that inflation had eroded. Those salary increases amounted to a congressional effort to adjust judicial salaries to reflect "fluctuations in the value of money," The Federalist No. 79, at 473 (A. Hamilton)—the kind of adjustment that the Founders believed "may be requisite," McKean, Debate in Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, Dec. 11, 1787, in 2 Debates on the Federal Constitution, at 539; see
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