No, Justice

John Roberts realizes that he's free to resign if he can't manage to eke out a living on $212,100 per year, right?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devoted his annual year-end report on the state of the nation's courts to just one issue, albeit one he said has "now reached the level of a constitutional crisis and threatens to undermine the strength and independence of the federal judiciary."

He continued: "I am talking about the failure to raise judicial pay."

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Congress has not acted on judicial pay for 2007, so for now salaries remain at their 2006 levels. That means Roberts will continue to be paid $212,100 a year, with associate Supreme Court justices at $203,000, appeals court judges at $175,100 and federal district judges at $165,200.

That's far more than the average American worker makes, but Roberts argued that while worker wages have increased nearly 18 percent in real terms since 1969, federal judicial pay has declined nearly 24 percent. And he said that while federal judges in 1969 made more money than the deans at the nation's top law schools, they now make only about half what deans and top law professors make.

"We do not even talk about comparisons with the practicing bar anymore," Roberts added parenthetically. Supreme Court clerks are routinely given a signing bonus equivalent to a justice's annual salary when they join one of Washington's top law firms after a year at the court, and Roberts pointed out that beginning lawyers often make as much as the experienced federal judges before whom they practice.

If that's how you feel, Mr. Chief Justice, why don't you step down? Why do you keep a job that pays you so much less than you think you deserve? Could it be the unparalleled job security? The unparalleled health coverage? The prestige? The notoriety? The power? What is it that could make men like John Roberts and Antonin Scalia practically give away their services in a slum like the United States Supreme Court?

How comforting it is to know that decisions that affect all Americans are being made by men who are so far adrift from reality.