Days After Decrying Flat Wages, McConnell Proposes Lowering Wages by $13 Billion
Joe Sonka on June 20, 2014 - 4:55 PM ET
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
On the Senate floor Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell made his pitch that Republicans are the ones looking out for the working class, “whose wages have remained stubbornly flat.”
At a press conference in Northern Kentucky this afternoon, McConnell presented his new fundraising plan to replace an obsolete bridge connecting the state to Ohio: lowering the wage of construction workers.
At issue is the Brent Spence Bridge running over the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Northern Kentucky, which is outdated and long in need of being replaced with a new bridge. However, that effort has stalled for many years, as there just aren’t enough federal Highway dollars coming through to make it happen. The current state proposal is to use tolls to fund a new bridge, but many locals are viscerally opposed to that idea. McConnell has long deflected questions on funding the bridge by saying that it is a state issue that he has nothing to do with. Back in the pre–Tea Party days—when McConnell was the King of Pork, running in 2008 on all of the gifts he brought back home—he could have just snuck in a giant earmark or two to get the project going, but ever since his new Republican colleagues stormed the castle in 2011, Mitch’s hands have been tied.
Today’s press conference was announced suddenly, billed as McConnell’s new secret plan to fund the bridge and save Kentuckians from paying tolls—pivoting away from his years of indifference. And that plan is to simply pay for the bridge by repealing the federal prevailing wage law so that workers are paid less, supposedly saving $13 billion over ten years. As McConnell and his campaign later said, Davis-Bacon is just a “depression-era law” and “red tape.” So much for those stubbornly flat wages, construction workers.
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But how would $13 billion into the federal coffers over ten years help rebuild the Brent Spence, since the federal Highway Trust Fund is already running on fumes with dozens of other projects also waiting for funding? One of those projects is the Ohio River Bridges Project down the river in Louisville, whose residents are also set to pay bridge tolls—why is there no similar promise to them? Not to mention the fact that the repeal of Davis-Bacon—a longtime fantasy of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation—is a pipe dream with no realistic chance of happening in Congress.
According to Amanda VanBenschoten of The Cincinnati Enquirer, reporters grilled McConnell with these questions, but he didn’t seem thrilled about going into too much detail.
Alison Lundergan Grimes ripped the McConnell plan as a desperate election-year flip-flop, and countered with a plan—released just before McConnell’s announcement—to free up $75 billion over ten years by cutting tax loopholes for the wealthy, such as corporate deductions for excessive stock options and the corporate jet loophole, and cracking down on companies’ use of overseas tax havens.
Grimes’s plan—which is similar to Obama’s infrastructure plan—would likely go nowhere in the current Congress, or whatever we’ll end up with next year, just as the case with McConnell’s plan to get rid of the prevailing wage. Unless something dramatic changes in the political landscape of Kentucky and DC, these Kentuckians will be paying tolls to cross the bridge, if it’s ever built. However, Grimes can at least present her option for the bridge to voters as being paid for by cutting off loopholes used by billionaires, while McConnell is protecting his wealthy friends so he can make sure that workers have a smaller paycheck.
For a Grimes campaign that is intent on portraying McConnell as an out-of-touch, uncaring career politician who is bought and paid for by wealthy CEOs, today’s press conference was likely music to their ears.
Here's Sen McTurtle a few days earlier:
Three Days After Speaking at a Koch Summit, McConnell Says He’s For the Little Guy
Joe Sonka on June 18, 2014 - 2:40 PM ET
Charles Koch
Charles Koch (AP Photo/Topeka Capital-Journal, Mike Burley)
As The Nation reported yesterday, Senator Mitch McConnell was a featured speaker on Sunday at the Koch brothers’ secretive conference for billionaire Republican donors at a swanky California resort. McConnell reportedly held a “strategy discussion” with Koch legal operative Mark Holden on his favorite topic: freeing up unlimited and unchecked campaign contributions and spending from America’s wealthiest donors, which is what the First Amendment intended. According to an attendee, part of that strategy is a goal to raise $500 million for Republicans to take control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, and $500 million more to take the White House in 2016.
This background, as well as McConnell’s voting record, made his statements on the Senate floor this morning all the more remarkable.
In his speech, McConnell said that despite the “political theater” of Senate Democrats, Republicans are actually the ones out there fighting for the little guy—the underpaid middle class, working moms and college students—and fighting against the “well-off” and “well-connected” interests who attempt to rig the political system in their favor.
Yes, political theater is so, so terrible.
McConnell said that Senate Democrats are trying to hide the fact that Republicans are “quietly assembling a lot of good ideas aimed at helping middle-class Americans deal with the stresses of a modern economy” and “working overtime behind the scenes to make their lives easier or paychecks bigger for working moms and recent college graduates.” Those “quiet” and “behind the scenes” ideas “address the concerns and anxieties of working men and women whose wages have remained stubbornly flat during the Obama years, even as the cost of everything from college tuition to healthcare continues to soar.”
McConnell added that these ideas are consistent with the GOP’s longstanding commitment to their principle of ensuring government has “a shared responsibility for the weak”—an amazing claim that he first trotted out last month, days after his Republican primary victory.
McConnell concluded: “While Democrats have been plotting on ways to hold onto their majority, we’ve been listening to the concerns and anxieties of our constituents and figuring out new, creative ways to address them. It’s long past time we had a real debate in this country, instead of false choice Democrats constantly present to the public between their own failed ideas and some political villain that doesn’t exist.”
This nonexistent “villain” that McConnell alludes to may be his own party, or it may be the figures who Democrats have been trying to tie around the neck of Republicans for many months: Charles and David Koch, the gracious resort hosts of McConnell and billionaire donors last weekend who seek to buy Washington, DC, and turn it into their own deregulated wonderland of plutocracy. And with the strict security at the Koch summit, one might even call such plotting “quiet” and “behind the scenes,” in favor of the “well-off” and “well-connected.” But how dare the Democrats plot about winning Senate elections, right?
McConnell’s concern about stagnant wages and his desire to make “paychecks bigger” for working moms and young people doesn’t need a behind-the-scenes approach, but it might require raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, which McConnell strenuously opposes and his campaign manager called “class warfare.” Some of those working moms might even be helped by very public legislation to prevent wage discrimination against women, though McConnell has voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.
If McConnell is concerned about rising tuition costs and the bank account of recent college graduates, he also could have chosen not to filibuster and block Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill to allow graduates to refinance their student loans and avoid decades of crushing debt—if the Koch summit attendees don’t mind that legislation closing their tax loopholes, of course.
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McConnell is also concerned about the rising costs of healthcare, though I’m not sure how repealing the Affordable Care Act—and taking away the healthcare coverage of over 400,000 Kentuckians who gained insurance through the state’s exchange, Kynect—will ease that concern.
And this “shared responsibility for the weak” that McConnell says he adheres to? I’m not sure who is the “weak” he refers to, but if that includes people who have had their unemployment insurance cut off, SNAP benefits cut, or undocumented immigrants looking for comprehensive immigration reform, McConnell and his Republican colleagues probably shouldn’t have worked so hard to stick it to these individuals.
Yes, political theater is so, so terrible.
While liberals and environmentalists may be nauseated by Alison Lundergan Grimes’s positions and rhetoric on coal and the EPA, she presents an extremely clear contrast on the issues McConnell played loose with this morning. Grimes has touted her support for an increase in the minimum wage since the day she announced her candidacy last July; she supports equal pay legislation; she supports a Constitutional amendment to roll back the Citizens United decision;, and she supports Warren’s student loan bill.
Warren is even coming to Kentucky soon to campaign for Grimes, highlighting McConnell’s vote against student loan reform and his obedience to the whims of billionaires hanging out in private California resorts who plot how to make the wealthy and powerful even more so.
The Warren-Grimes event may even be out in the public, where the little guys can hear it.
