Harold Meyerson of “The American Prospect” tells the story of Republican perfidy in overturning the will of the voters regarding minimum wage.
Republican voters approve minimum wage hikes; Republican legislators overturn them.
On Election Day earlier this month, Arkansas voters went to the polls and approved a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage. It wasn’t close: 68 percent of them voted Yes. Just to their north, in Missouri, voters also approved a minimum wage hike, with 62 percent of them voting Yes.
Though Arkansas and Missouri are among the reddest of states, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone. Every ballot measure to hike a state’s minimum wage over the past few decades has been approved. Indeed, the only group of Americans dead set against such raises appears to be Republican legislators.
On Wednesday, demonstrating just how removed those legislators are from the concerns of the American people, Republicans in the Michigan state senate voted to gut a minimum wage increase they had approved before the November elections—in a way that allowed them to rescind their approval once the elections had safely been dispensed with.
Earlier this year, progressive activists had gathered more than the required number of signatures to place a measure on November’s ballot that would have raised the state minimum wage to $12 by 2022, and the tipped worker minimum to $12 as well, but phasing it in more slowly. At that point, Republicans in the legislature intervened to enact a law identical to the ballot measure, but with the proviso that they could amend that law later this year. By so doing, they knocked the measure off the ballot. Had it remained on the ballot and been passed, as it surely would have been, it would have required the votes of three-quarters of the legislators to amend it. By passing it as a law, however, the Republicans ensured that it could be amended by a simple majority vote.
And on Wednesday, the simple, if devious, Republican majority in the state senate amended the law. In place of the stipulation that the minimum be raised to $12 by 2022, the Republicans pushed that back to 2030. The minimum for tipped workers was scaled back from $12 to $4, with that figure not to kick in until 2030 as well. The measure now goes to the House, where the Republican majority is expected to follow the Senate’s lead and send it to the desk of Republican Governor Rick Snyder, of Flint-deadly-water fame. The reason for this unseemly haste is that come the new year, a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, will succeed Snyder as governor, and she’s made clear there’s no way she’d sign such changes into law.
Michigan voters swept Democrats (all of them women) into every major statewide office in November’s voting; Republicans narrowly retained their state legislative majorities through the grace of gerrymandering. With Whitmer as governor, they won’t be able to carve such sweet-deal districts for themselves in the post-census redistricting, but for now, their gerrymandered moats and gerrymandered minds insulate them from the concerns and desires of their fellow Americans. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The American Prospect and the rest of us may find the Public Religion Research Institute
interesting and instructive. PRRI’s lofty rhetoric includes the following, “will illuminate America’s changing cultural, religious and political landscape…committed to independent inquiry…will help journalists, scholars, pundits, thought leaders, clergy and the general public understand DEBATES (my capitalization) in public policy issues…will never alter to accommodate other interests, funders, organizations (etc.) ….”
PRRI’s research areas, found through searching the internet and, by review of those listed at its site include, climate change, immigration, law and criminal justice, politics and elections, race and ethnicity, religion and culture, sports. What topic is MIA?…it’s education.
Thinking it odd that, in light of Betsy DeVos’s position as the least liked Trump cabinet member, education would be omitted (avoided?) as a topic, I looked at the bio’s of the top staff. One was formerly with Media Matters. A couple of years ago, Media Matters’ article about school privatization identified the right wing power pushing privatization but omitted the prominent Gates and Walton heirs. Another top PRRI manager was formerly with the Center for American Progress, which promotes charter schools. (David Brock created Media Matters and John Podesta founded CAP which is led by Neera Tanden.)
The description that critics provide for Third Way is corporate, neoliberal,
power brokers. Do any of the top managers at PRRI have former links withThird Way?
Cynics might think the reason it is difficult to explain the significance of the loss of America’s most important common good to the public is because there is concerted effort to create a debate void in American democracy..
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The GOP is determined to keep low wage workers in a state peonage. How dare they demand what amounts to poverty wages ($12/hour is not exactly a king’s ransom) over outright destitution wages, $4/hour. They are trying to get $15/hour passed in NJ but it will also be phased in over time and will not affect small businesses with less than 50 employees. There are so many carve outs and timed phase-ins that $12 or $15 an hour will be totally inadequate by the time they are enacted. It’s called indentured servitude or soft core slavery.
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“Though Arkansas and Missouri are among the reddest of states, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone. Every ballot measure to hike a state’s minimum wage over the past few decades has been approved. Indeed, the only group of Americans dead set against such raises appears to be Republican legislators.”
Actually, if you factor in the illegal voter operation in these very red states, you will see an even higher approval amongst voters for the living wage minimum. Voter suppression is one of the biggest sleeping giants in the United States, and it is continuing to slowly approach its day of reckoning. The volcano will eventually erupt and expose its fatalities.
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Any group of legislators that vacate the will of the people should be targeted for removal in the next election. They are obviously not representing the people they serve. People should realize that voting for most conservatives today is a vote against their own self interest.
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Government of, by and for the people??????
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This is why we need a strong union movement; unions don’t beg for measly peanuts, they demand better wages that one can actually live on. The GOP/conservatives/right-wingers/libertarians claim that if wages are raised or if a minimum wage is enacted, the employers will just fire their employees or reduce the hours of employment. Companies are pretty much doing that now, without a proper minimum wage. These are just libertarian balderdash, smokescreens and propaganda to keep wages low so that employers can hoard all the profits and gains for themselves.
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Who really owns the GOP? Extremist alt-right billionaires like Charles Koch and the Wal-Mart Walton family.
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