The Legislative Branch
Minimum Wage, Maximum Gall
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 2, 2006; A15
Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid has taken to invoking Harry Truman's line about a "do-nothing Congress," and with ample reason. In dealing with the major issues of our time (global warming, immigration, the diminishing benefits and stagnant wages that characterize today's economy) or in discharging its oversight duties over administration policies that have failed (the war in Iraq) or were stillborn (the rescue of New Orleans), the Republican-controlled Congress has been nowhere to be found. In inverse relation to the seriousness of the challenges that America confronts, this Congress is well on its way to spending the fewest days in session of any in modern memory.Still, the one thing that should engender more fear than the current Congress's doing nothing is the current Congress's doing something. Every time congressional Republicans are compelled by public pressure to address a serious issue, they retreat to their laboratory and emerge with Frankenstein-monster legislation designed primarily to reward their campaign donors and stick it to the Democrats, and only secondarily to fix the problem. The Medicare drug program they crafted with the Bush White House enabled seniors to obtain some medications at a lower price, but it codified the continued upward spiral of drug prices by forbidding the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies -- a linchpin of Republican campaign finance -- to bring prices down.
Now they're at it again. Facing pressure from Northeastern and Midwestern House Republicans fearful of losing their seats this November, the House leadership has at long last relented and crafted a bill, which passed the House at around 1:30 Saturday morning, to raise the hourly minimum wage from its current abysmal $5.15 to $7.25 in three separate stages over the next three years. A decade has passed since Congress last hiked the minimum wage, during which time it has managed in a series of votes to raise its own members' salaries by a cool $31,000. Democrats and labor were hammering the Republicans over this most double of standards; minimum-wage workers were showing up at the Republicans' district offices and on local TV newscasts to dramatize the disparity.
So Republicans had to respond, and they did so in their inimitable cynical fashion. Appended to the minimum wage hike that the vast majority of them opposed was a provision genuinely dear to their hearts: a cut in the estate tax that chiefly benefits the super-rich and that will reduce government revenue over the next decade, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, by $753 billion. The shortfall could well lead to offsetting cuts in programs that benefit the same working poor that the minimum-wage increase would help. But who cares about the poor? The whole point of the exercise was to come up with a bill that might force some Democrats to vote for an estate tax cut they would otherwise oppose, and enable Republicans to claim they weren't really the Dickensian grotesques that many of them in fact are.
No matter what the Repubs do, it will end up costing you and me down the road. Count on it. Orwell wasn't writing fiction, he was writing prophecy.