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House Republicans Poison Minimum Wage Increase |
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House Republican leaders early Saturday morning poisoned the chance for millions of minimum wage workers to receive their first pay raise in a decade.
Rather than a straight up or down vote on raising the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25, they pushed through a cynical sham bill packed with poison pills that included repealing the estate tax. As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said Friday evening, the estate tax provision guaranteed death of the minimum wage increase “because the Senate has already rejected the estate tax repeal. That is unlikely to change, and Republican leaders of the House know it.” The cost of the combined tax package the Republicans packed into the minimum wage bill likely would be more than $800 billion for the first 10 years—on top of trillions of dollars in debt Republican economic policies already have prompted.
The 230-180 vote came at 1:30 a.m. Saturday after Republican leaders for months had blocked a vote on a clean bill (H.R. 2429) from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to raise the minimum wage—which now has its lowest buying power in more than 50 years—to $7.25 an hour.
Why their sudden willingness to vote on the wage increase? They need cover because they’re facing tough re-election campaigns and an electorate that backs an increase by more than 80 percent—coupled with a mobilization blitz from the AFL-CIO America Needs a Raise campaign that spotlighted the nine pay raises members of Congress have rewarded themselves since the last time the minimum wage was increased.
Capitol Hill observers say many Republican lawmakers didn’t want to enter the long, pre-election August recess with the issue on the front burner and confront more demonstrations such as the 20 that AFL-CIO and Working America activists staged recently.
To prevent wage hike backers from mounting a strong public campaign to defeat the sham wage bill, Republicans invoked a little used rule—called “Martial Law”—to circumvent normal House procedure of waiting at least 24 hours after a bill is introduced before voting on it. That means the bill’s obnoxious details weren’t released until just before the vote.
Said Miller Friday morning:
This issue is really as simple as it gets. Do you support increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, or don’t you? Do you believe that Americans should receive a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s work, or don’t you? The issue is so basic that Democratic legislation to raise the minimum wage fits neatly onto just one and a half pages.
Today’s poisoned action follows a long pattern. In the Senate this year, Republican leaders offered tried to swap Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) bill to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour with an increase of just $1.10 an hour. The Republican measure included provisions allowing employers to cut a worker’s overtime pay by $3,000 per year by substituting an 80-hour, two-week work period for the traditional 40-hour workweek. It also would have cut pay by as much as $5.50 an hour for tipped workers by nullifying their state minimum wage protections.
In 2000, the Republican minimum wage proposal would have made workers wait longer for the raise. That effort included $123 billion in tax breaks—91 percent of which would have gone to the richest 10 percent of Americans and 73 percent of which would have gone to the richest 1 percent. Overall, that bill gave upper-income taxpayers $11 in tax breaks for every $1 in increased wages for low-wage workers.
Friday Sweeney said:
The minimum wage increase should not depend on whether billionaires get another tax break. For nine years, there has been no increase in the minimum wage. Minimum wage workers should not have to wait for Paris Hilton to get another tax cut before they can get a wage increase.
There is a majority in both houses of Congress for an increase to $7.25 and Republicans are twisting themselves into knots when a simple up or down vote would do.
Despite the Republican leaders’ wish to make the minimum wage issue go away, House Democratic Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) says it’s not going to happen:
A vote in the House is not the end of the road and Democrats are determined to continue this fight until we enact this increase into law. This is simply a matter of doing what is right and just.
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