Democrats and Minimum Wage
Posted by informedstudents on April 24, 2007
The Hills Pundits Blog:
Why are Democrats attaching a completely unrelated minimum-wage provision into the Iraq war supplemental? What exactly does increasing the minimum wage have to do with providing our troops the money they need to protect themselves from Iraqi insurgents?
I have two answers: politics and partisanship.
First, the Democratic leadership is trying to trip up moderate Republicans who might want to vote to support an increase in the minimum wage but don’t want to surrender in Iraq. And since they know the president will veto this bill, they can get him on record vetoing a minimum-wage bill when he already said that he would sign one.
I can already see the 30-second ads in my mind. Congressman Joe Blow votes to increase his own pay but votes against increasing the pay of minimum-wage workers. We have seen this ad before, but it hasn’t been included in a war supplemental before. This is a new level of cynicism.
Second, partisanship. The new Democratic majority can’t put together the votes to pass a minimum-wage conference report or a wartime supplemental without resorting to these kinds of shenanigans because they have decided to go it alone. No input from any Republican. No effort to get Republican support. A new version of the majority of the majority.
We were promised something different when the Democrats retook the Congress for the first time in a decade. Instead, we get strange bills, where the minimum-wage increase, the top priority of the Democratic leadership, is slipped into the most controversial and arguably most important piece of legislation that this Congress will act on this year, the emergency supplemental that support our troops in wartime.
The Democrats should vote on the minimum wage separately. It shouldn’t be included in a supplemental.
I couldn’t agree more the Democrats are merely trying to make political moves to cripple the Republicans. Adding all the “pork” to the supplemental bill is wasting our time, and our tax dollars. If anyone is against minimum wage increase its the Democrats, cause they are in control and are playing party politics.
gamer881 said
I strongly disagree with this article, and the blogger’s opinion. What people do not understand is what supplementals are SUPPOSED to be used for.
Supplementals are money that is borrowed from other countries in order to pay for an unexpected occurances, such as relief for a natural distaster (money Democrats are allotting for Katrina victims in this bill), assistance to farmers who faced lost revenue due to drought or flooding (peanut farmers, spinach farmers, etc), and the onset of war.
This war has been going on for over four years now, so noone can say that we are facing “the onset of war.” The reason that Bush has not added the war into the official budget is so that his administration can control how the money is spent without much oversight from Congress, which they have over the budget.
What the democrats are doing is simply using the supplementals for what they are supposed to be used for – helping Americans whose lives have been affected by means outside of their control. By now, the war should be in the budget and Republicans should stop complaining that the Democrats are forcing the President to use the supplementals for what they are supposed to be used for.