Washington ? In his first year-end assessment of the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts urged Congress to increase judicial pay to help keep good judges on the bench and to recruit new ones.

Roberts, who succeeded the late William Rehnquist, warned Congress that judges’ pay is an issue that is driving them off the bench and deterring lawyers from throwing their names into consideration for judgeships.

“A strong and independent judiciary is not something that, once established, maintains itself,” Roberts wrote. “It is instead a trust that every generation is called upon to preserve, and the values it secures can be lost as readily through neglect as direct attack.”

In many of his 19 year-end reports, Rehnquist put judicial pay raises at the top of his wish list for Congress’ consideration, once noting that he realized he was “beating a dead horse.”

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported recently that pay rates beginning today are $175,100 for circuit judges, $165,200 for district judges, and $151,984 for bankruptcy and full-time magistrate judges. Rates for members of the Supreme Court are $212,100 for the chief justice and $203,000 for associate justices.

Roberts opened his report on the federal courts by insisting that he didn’t want to seem presumptuous after just three months on the job. But, like Rehnquist, he did not mince words on the pay issue and called it a “direct threat to judicial independence.”

He said judges are leaving the bench in greater numbers than ever before, compared to the 1960s when only a handful of federal judges retired or resigned. Since 1990, he said, 92 judges have left the bench, 59 of them to go into more lucrative private practice. In the past five years, 37 judges have left, nine of them last year, Roberts said.

Real pay for judges has declined substantially, the chief justice said. “If Congress gave judges a raise of 30 percent tomorrow, judges would – after adjusting for inflation – be making about what judges made in 1969,” he wrote. “This is not fair to our nation’s federal judges and should not be allowed to continue.”