Labor & Employment Law

RNC?s Steele Refuses to Say if Minimum Wage Is Constitutional?BTW, the Answer Is YES!

By Mike Hall

Republicans say the federal minimum wage law violates the Constitution. Tell these workers.

It?s one thing for Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to be unable to remember the federal minimum wage?$7.25 an hour (chump change to Steele, but darn important to the worker trying to stay afloat on the minimum wage).

But it is completely another and downright weaselly thing to duck and talk circles around a simple question about if he believes, like so many other Republican candidates do this fall, that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, should be abolished or reduced.

Last night on MSNBC?s “The Last Word,” Steele bent himself into all kinds of shapes to avoid saying if the Republican Party agreed or disagreed with their Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller?s out-in-far-right-field claim the minimum wage is unconstitutional. Sure seems to be a pretty simple “Yes” or “No” kind of question.

But then again, maybe he didn?t want to upset the tea partiers?with whom Steele says Republicans are in ?lockstep??and some of whom, like Miller, are making claims about the U.S. Constitution that can only be called strange. Just yesterday, Miller said he wanted to repeal the 17th Amendment adopted in 1913 that gave voters the right to directly elect their U.S. senators. Up to that point, senators were appointed by the states. We can?t make this stuff up.

Miller, John Raese in West Virginia?who also wants to abolish the departments of Education and Energy?Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky are all part of the Republican minimum wage hit team. While Steele refuses to be pinned down on repealing the minimum wage, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka laid it out pretty clearly in a meeting with reporters yesterday.

You can only look at the facts. In West Virginia, the Republican Party has given massive amounts of money to Raese. One of Raese’s main platforms is that they ought to do away with the minimum wage….I mean, if they are sponsoring that candidate you have to assume they are sponsoring that statement. They believe in that statement. The same with Rand [Paul], I mean every one of them, Sharron Angle, Miller up in Alaska.

All of those candidates are saying do away with the minimum wage do away with regulations and they are getting massive amounts of money from the Republican Party. So you have to say the Republican Party agrees with them. So if they get elected is that their platform? Are they going to do away with the minimum wage? Ask them.

Maybe they’ll answer the next time.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 06, 2010 (boomark / email).