“Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way”: Will Republicans Raise The Minimum Wage? History Says Yes
Republicans may not have applauded when President Obama called for Congress to raise the minimum wage in his State of the Union address, but if history is any guide, it’s a good bet they will eventually do just that.
Since the minimum wage was established in 1938, every president, Republican or Democrat, except for Ronald Reagan has signed an increase into law. And in almost every instance, the bill came to the president’s desk with a big bipartisan vote from Congress. When Democrats crank up the pressure — and are willing to compromise with business interests — Republicans have routinely relented.
The most recent increase was in 2007, when nearly every Senate Republican and more than 60 percent of the House Republican Caucus voted in favor. And if you think the Republican Party was wildly more moderate back then, here are a few of the people that voted “Aye”: Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Bobby Jindal, and David Vitter.
What was different than today was the person sitting in the Oval Office: A chastened Republican giving his fellow conservatives political cover. But two other past increases played out against a similar political backdrop as today. In 1996 and 1949, congressional conservatives faced a Democratic president they loathed, yet were unwilling to face the voters and say they blocked a wage hike.
In the presidential election year of 1996, Speaker Newt Gingrich quietly signaled to his House caucus that they should let the increase go through after procedural stalling prompted the AFL-CIO to pound Republicans with television ads. Feeling the heat, 40 percent of House Republicans eventually crossed the aisle.
Over in the Senate, Majority Leader Bob Dole had been fighting the increase. But he resigned his Senate seat in June to jumpstart his campaign for president. Soon after, new Majority Leader Trent Lott, facing a Democratic threat to propose minimum wage amendments to every bill that reached the floor, backed down and allowed the bill to come to a vote. More than half of the caucus broke ranks.
In 1949, President Harry Truman just had been elected to his first full term in the most famous comeback in political history, thanks to a fiercely populist campaign that also reclaimed control of Congress to the Democrats. Yet it was not a liberal Congress. An informal alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans remained in force, and would eventually squelch most of Truman’s “Fair Deal” proposals. But the widely popular minimum wage was a rare exception.
Truman’s proposed increase was particularly ambitious, almost doubling the base hourly rate from 40 cents to 75 cents (from $3.81 to $7.14 in today’s dollars) and dramatically expanding the pool of workers covered by the law. As Truman historian Mark Byrnes recently recounted, conservatives did try to stop Truman, “but not by using today’s obstructionist tactics. They actually proposed an alternative: Limiting the increase to 65 cents an hour, indexing the wage to inflation, and eliminating the expansion of workers covered.” In the end, they struck a hard bargain. Truman got his wage increase, but as Byrnes notes, “in the short run [the compromise] actually reduced the number of workers covered by the law.”
In fact, all of the minimum wage increases mentioned above came with sops to the business lobby that eased Republican opposition. The 1996 and 2007 bills came with small business tax cuts and failed to increase the minimum wage for waiters who receive tips. That minimum remains stuck at $2.13.
Is this history relevant today? Or is the current Tea Party hatred of President Obama too much to overcome?
Consider the following:
The popularity of the issue is as strong as ever: In a Quinnipiac poll from earlier this month, 71 percent support an increase, including 52 percent of Republicans.
As I wrote here back in October, Speaker John Boehner has proven vulnerable to Democratic pressure tactics when Democrats are on extremely firm political ground — providing disaster relief, keeping the government open, and raising taxes on the wealthy to avert a tax hike on the middle class.
Finally, the Democratic proposal that Obama endorsed this week is a highly ambitious one — akin to Truman’s 1949 opening bid — which leaves much room for compromise.
The Harkin-Miller bill envisions a $10.10 hourly minimum wage, which would raise the floor to one of the highest levels in history after accounting for inflation. It would then index the minimum wage to inflation, meaning it would stay at that high level forever. And it jacks up the hourly minimum of tipped workers to about $7.
Poll numbers were not enough to break Boehner on an issue like gun control, because the gun lobby is politically potent and implacable. But history shows the business lobbies generally opposed to the minimum wage are far more willing to deal. And there is room to maneuver on the final rate, on indexing, and on tipped workers.
Where a final deal gets tricky is not how Democrats can scale back their opening bid, it’s what sweeteners can be concocted for the business lobby to attract Republican support. The tax break model of the 1996 and 2007 bills will be much harder to pull off under the tight budget caps both parties accepted and wrote into law this month.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Democrats have an abundance of will, and Republicans will need a way out. As history shows, they always take it.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, January 30, 2014
“Life Changing And Life Saving”: Remembering What Matters About The Affordable Care Act
On the Affordable Care Act front today, there’s very good practical news, and not-so-good political news. That gives us an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves to keep in mind what’s really important when we talk about health care.
Let’s start with the good news. First, as Marketplace reported this morning, a new report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows that the average health insurance premium on the exchanges is actually lower than the average premium in employer-sponsored plans. And it isn’t because the coverage is inadequate; according to a spokesperson, “even when you factor in all the out-of-pocket costs, the average top tier gold and platinum plans are similar to employer ones.” It’s hard to overstate what a success this is. If you’ve ever bought health insurance on the individual market before now, you know that if you could get covered at all, you were likely to get a plan that was expensive but had lots of gaps and lots of cost-sharing. The whole point of the exchanges was to give people buying insurance on their own the same advantage of pooling large numbers of customers that you get when you’re covered through your employer. If it’s working, then that’s something to celebrate.
Second, as Jonathan Cohn tells us, Wellpoint, one of the nation’s largest insurers, is reporting that exchange sign-ups are meeting their expectations; they have 400,000 new customers, and expect the number to rise to a million by the end of open enrollment. Even more critically, although their new customers are slightly older than the population as a whole, they expected this because people with a more pressing need for insurance would be the first to sign up, and they already incorporated that into their rates for this year. That means they’re unlikely to lose money, there is unlikely to be a huge rate spike next year, and the dreaded “death spiral” looks less and less likely.
This supports the contention I’ve had for some time, that in its first few years the Affordable Care Act is going to basically be fine—it may not create a health care paradise, but nor will it be the disaster conservatives are so fervently hoping for.
Before we get to sorting through what matters from what doesn’t, let’s look at the not-so-good political news. The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with their latest health care tracking poll, and there isn’t a lot to be glad about. More people have an unfavorable than a favorable view of the ACA. Most Americans are unaware that almost all the provisions of the law are now in force. And maybe most troubling, nearly half of Americans are still unaware of the law’s most popular provision, that insurance companies are no longer allowed to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions:
Before you say, “Obama should have told people about it!” I must remind you that during the last four years you spent away from Earth, the administration and its allies did in fact repeat over and over and over again that the ACA prohibits insurance companies from denying you coverage if you have a pre-existing condition. There are many reasons why so many people haven’t yet understood, but you can’t say they didn’t try (you can read more about the myth of the bad sales job here).
In any case, here’s what we have to remember: On the scales of history, a person with a pre-existing condition who gets health coverage weighs much more than a person who doesn’t know that because of the ACA, people with pre-existing conditions can get health coverage. We spend so much time talking about politics that it’s easy to forget that politics are not an end in themselves, they’re a means to an end. Liberals advocated for comprehensive health insurance reform for so many decades not because it was politically advantageous (at some times it was, and at other times the voters didn’t seem to care), but because it was right. The fact that so many millions of Americans had no health security up until now was a moral obscenity. The ACA is beginning to fix things—slower and less completely than we might like, but it is a beginning. And if it never becomes the political boon you were hoping for, it was still the right thing to do.
That isn’t to say that political effects don’t matter, because they do. If the Republicans take over the Senate this fall, bad things would result, particularly if they also win the White House two years later, and if the ACA’s political troubles contributed to that turn of events, it would be unfortunate. But in the long run, what matters most is the effect on Americans’ lives. When you get distressed by a story about a Democratic member of Congress who’s in a tough race where her opponent is hitting her for supporting Obamacare, you can think of the families who never had health coverage before, but do now. For millions of people it will life-changing, and for many, literally life-saving. Try not to forget.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 30, 2014
“Is Barack Obama A Tyrant?”: Spoiler Alert, The Answer Is No
A typical State of the Union address is criticized for being a “laundry list,” little more than an endless string of proposals the president would like to see enacted. The criticism usually has two parts: first, most of the items on the laundry list will never come to pass, and second, it makes for a boring speech (the pundits who make the criticism seem to care more about the second part). Last night’s SOTU didn’t have the usual laundry list (which of course meant that it was criticized for being too vague), but the one specific proposal getting much attention today is President Obama’s idea to require that on future federal contracts, all workers be paid at least $10.10 per hour. So naturally, Republicans are crying that this is the latest example of Obama’s tyrannical rule, in which he ruthlessly ignores the law whenever he pleases.
As Ted Cruz wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.” Is there anything to this criticism? Is Obama more of a tyrant than, say, his immediate predecessor? Let’s take a look.
We’ve seen this again and again with Republican critiques of Obama, that a substantive criticism over a policy often gives way to a process criticism. For instance, Republicans often complain that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through” Congress before anyone had a chance to know what was happening, by which they mean it was debated for over a year, sent through endless hearings, and eventually passed by both houses of congress and signed by the President, and how could that be legitimate? In this case, they know that debating the merits of a minimum wage increase is a political loser, since an increase is supported by between two-thirds and three-quarters of the public in every poll. So it’s much safer to criticize this executive order as inherently unlawful.
In this particular case, however, there’s no question that what President Obama has proposed is neither illegal nor particularly tyrannical. Does the president have the authority to set rules that federal contractors must abide by through an executive order? Yes he does. Does that extend to the wages of the employees who work on federal contracts? Yes it does. If Congress wanted to pass a law rewriting these rules, it could, but unless it does, the president can do it himself. And of course, the next president could reverse Obama’s rules if he or she chose.
So there’s nothing illegal or oppressive about this executive order; the problem conservatives have with it is substantive. It’s possible, however, that they have a broader case to make that Obama is a tyrant. This is a familiar debate, because all presidents chafe at the limits on their power, and many have tried to test those limits. For instance, George W. Bush pushed at the limits of presidential power mostly in the area of national security. I myself can recall using the “tyranny” word with regard to the case of Jose Padilla, whom you may recall as the “dirty bomber,” though the government eventually gave up their assertion that he planned to set off a dirty bomb. What was so dangerous about the Padilla case was that the official position of the Bush administration was that the president had the authority to order a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil, then imprison him for life without charging him with any crime or giving him a trial. It also held that the courts had no right to examine their decision to do so. I do not exaggerate; that was their position. (In the end, when the Supreme Court was about to rule on the case and it was clear the administration would lose, they changed course and put Padilla through the civilian criminal justice system, after holding him for years without charge and subjecting him to a program of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation that quite literally drove him insane.)
There were other memorable ways the Bush administration asserted, sometimes quite openly, that it was above the law. Sometimes it would simply attach a new name to what it was doing; torture is illegal, so when we torture prisoners, we’re not actually torturing them, we’re using “enhanced interrogation.” My personal favorite may be when Dick Cheney proclaimed that as a member of the executive branch, he could use executive privilege as a justification for ignoring congressional subpoenas for documents, but that he was also exempt from laws covering the executive branch, because the vice president is also President of the Senate and therefore part of the legislative branch, though he isn’t subject to their rules either. Cheney declared himself a kind of quantum government official, existing simultaneously in both places yet in neither place, so that he was subject to no laws that restrained either branch.
As for President Obama, there are certainly some areas in which he has tested the limits of presidential power. Just like every president before him, he has made recess appointments when Congress is in something that may or may not qualify as a “true” recess (the Supreme Court is taking up this question). He ordered that deportations of “dreamers”—young people brought to America illegally who are completing school or military service—should be a low enforcement priority, which was a legal way of temporarily creating a situation similar to a law (the DREAM Act) that hasn’t yet been passed. And he has delayed some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act like the employer mandate, which conservatives cried was outside his authority to do, complete with the requisite invocations of King George III. But as Simon Lazarus noted, delays of regulatory enforcement are common, and the courts rarely find the delay illegal unless it goes on indefinitely and can’t be justified.
In all these cases, it’s true that Obama sought ways to bend the law to his policy preferences. But in every case, he found a way, completely within the law. (As it happens, Obama has issued relatively few executive orders—168 so far, compared to George W. Bush’s 291, Bill Clinton’s 364, Ronald Reagan’s 381, and Franklin Roosevelt’s 3,522. The volume doesn’t tell you how many of the orders were constitutionally questionable, of course, but if he were really a tyrant one might think he’d work harder at it.) That’s what’s happening with the minimum wage; he can’t raise it for all workers without Congress passing an increase into law, but he can raise it for those who work on federal contracts, so that’s what he’s going to do.
You may recall that some conservatives have been calling Barack Obama a tyrant almost from the moment he took office. That’s because they viewed his very occupation of the White House as fundamentally illegitimate, so anything he does must by definition be outside the law. For months they railed angrily against White House “czars” who were supposedly wielding unaccountable power and were the prime evidence of Obama’s tyrannical rule, even though none of them could explain what a “czar” was and how it differed from a person who works on the White House staff. But that lessened their fury not a whit. And none of them were concerned in the least about the ways George W. Bush circumvented the law. That’s because they agreed with the substance of Bush’s policies.
So no, Barack Obama is not a tyrant. If conservatives want to argue that it would be a bad thing if people working on federal contracts made an extra buck or two, they should try to make that case. But I doubt they will.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 29, 2014
“GOP Post Campaign Buckraking”: When Politicians Embrace The Power Of Spam
As a notable Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain was able to pull together an email list of several hundred thousand people. His campaign obviously didn’t turn out well, but Cain eventually created an online media venture called Best of Cain, which continues to send out messages to former supporters on a wide range of topics.
How wide a range? Those on Cain’s mailing list recently received an alert with an all-caps subject line about a “breakthrough remedy” for erectile dysfunction. It was, of course, an ad – and a rather clumsy one at that. Cain supporters were told they were at risk of losing their loved one unless they got their “manhood mojo back.”
For many of us, it would appear as if Herman Cain has begun spamming Americans who supported his presidential campaign. But as Ben Adler reports in a fascinating piece, Cain and other Republicans believe they’ve come up with a lucrative business plan.
While [Cain] has been particularly unabashed in his embrace of the practice, he is not the only past presidential candidate hawking sketchy products. Newt Gingrich now pings the e-mail subscribers to his Gingrich Productions with messages from an investment firm formed by a conspiracy theorist successfully sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mike Huckabee uses his own production company’s list to blast out links to heart-disease fixes and can’t-miss annuities.
The joke about Cain and Gingrich during the 2012 campaign was that they weren’t at all serious about their pursuits of the presidency but instead just lining up future paydays. After Huckabee, who’d parlayed a strong showing in 2008 into publishing deals and his own Fox News show, declined to run again, some wags snickered that his new livelihood must have been too hard to give up. Now all three seem to be proving the cynics right…. Collectively, Cain, Gingrich, and Huckabee are pioneering a new, more direct method for post-campaign buckraking. All it requires is some digitally savvy accomplices – and a total immunity to shame.
There’s a reason I love this Chris Hayes comment from a while back: “Much of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks.”
One of the striking things about the ventures launched by Cain, Gingrich, and Huckabee is the odd incentive dynamic they’ve helped create: political activities that used to be based on partisanship, ideology, and/or ego are now profit-making opportunities.
A Republican may not have any interest in actually becoming president, but he or she now knows that a presidential campaign can create a lucrative mailing list. So why not run anyway for the sake of future paychecks?
It’s not just elections, either. Last summer, for example, as conservatives prepared for their government shutdown, Brian Walsh, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “[T]his is about political cash, not political principle.” Far-right groups were getting the base riled up, collecting contributions and email addresses, and weren’t especially concerned with the policy outcome.
More recently, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made the rounds on conservative media, talking up a possible lawsuit he might file against the NSA. In practice, the senator was encouraging interested Americans to visit his campaign website, submit their contact information, and chip in a donation while they were there. (The lawsuit he vowed to file hasn’t materialized.)
At the intersection of politics and profit is a Republican machine in search of email addresses, clicks, and cash. It’s not that conservative causes are irrelevant; it’s just that they’re hardly the only motivation for GOP players as interested in list-building as coalition-building.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 28, 2014
“Blinded By Hate”: Hillary Clinton’s Enemies Can’t See Straight
Rand Paul, who is weirdly a potentially serious contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, got asked on Meet the Press this past Sunday about a comment his wife had made about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. His answer was revealing, I think, of a mindset Republicans are going to struggle with mightily should Hillary Clinton run for president. I bring this up not because I think Paul’s comments are all that important in and of themselves, and not because Republicans are likely to spend a good deal of time talking about Monica Lewinsky come 2016. But there’s an impulse when it comes to Hillary Clinton that presents a real danger for Republicans. There are so many things they hate about her and her husband that they barely know where to start. And that hatred could well be their undoing.
If you heard “Rand Paul attacked Hillary Clinton over Monica Lewinsky,” you’ve been slightly misled. First of all, it was David Gregory who brought it up (here’s the transcript), and second, you can see in Paul’s answer the conflict between his rational brain, which says, “This is not what we should be talking about,” and his lizard brain, which says, “Grrr! Clinton!” A couple of times he tries to say that the issue is one for Bill Clinton’s “place in history,” but he can’t stop himself from trying to make the case that Democrats are hypocrites because they criticize Republicans for waging a “war on women,” when Bill Clinton had an affair with an intern fifteen years ago.
Even after all this time, and after the Clinton impeachment turned out to be such a disaster for them, so many conservatives still can’t wrap their heads around the idea that other Americans don’t think about that episode in the same way they do. For them, it’s a tale of crime and injustice, the injustice being the fact that Bill Clinton got away with it. It goes right to the heart of what they hated so much about him. It wasn’t that they had policy differences with him, though they did. What angered them so much about Bill Clinton was that he was better at politics than they were. He beat them again and again for so many years, and nothing embodies their frustration over those defeats more than the Lewinsky scandal. For god’s sake, they cry, the guy was caught diddling a twenty-something intern in the White House, and he still managed to wiggle his way out of it!
So when Rand Paul or any other conservative hears the name Lewinsky, the immediate emotional reaction he has is one of anger, frustration, and contempt for the Clintons. But most Americans don’t have the same reaction. First of all, they aren’t that angry about it anymore. It was a decade and a half ago. And second, their memories of the whole sordid affair are as much about Republicans going too far—an impeachment that never should have happened, Ken Starr’s salacious and obsessive pursuit of Clinton, an opposition party that grew more desperate and deranged the clearer it became that they’d never take down their white whale—as they are about the President’s misdeeds.
As for Hillary, well as far as they’re concerned she’s complicit in everything Bill did, and then you can add to that the contempt they have for her as a powerful woman. You just cannot overestimate the degree to which Hillary Clinton brings out the ugliest misogynistic feelings and sexual insecurities in so many people (not all of them conservatives, I would add). This is something I’ve written about before, and I’m sure I’ll be writing about it again, because it’s going to be a central part of any campaign in which she’s involved.
There are few things more fundamental to smart political strategy than the understanding that other people may not share your beliefs, and may not have the same emotional reactions you do to certain people and events. That understanding is what allows you to make thoughtful decisions about how to persuade the number of people you need to achieve your political goals, whether it’s passing a piece of legislation or winning an election. This is something Republicans often struggle with, but when it comes to the Clintons, they’re absolutely blinded by hate. To take just one example, if Hillary runs, we’re going to be hearing a lot about Benghazi, because Republicans are not only sure she did something scandalous, they’re also sure that if they just hammer away at it long enough, everybody else will become convinced, too. But just like with Bill’s impeachment, exactly the opposite is likely to happen: the more they talk about it, the more voters will become convinced that they’ve taken leave of their senses.
And that, more than anything else, may be what gives Hillary Clinton such a good chance of winning in 2016. When they’re looking at her, her opponents just can’t see straight.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 28, 2014
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