Month: September 2019

The Senate is Broken–You Can Blame Mitch McConnell

By Gary Bennett

The Capitol reflectred in a nearby pool.

As seen in the Frederick News-Post Monday, September 23, 2019

There is no shortage of important legislation the country wants, the Democrat-led House has passed (much with substantial bipartisan support), and the Republican-led Senate refuses to act on. At last count, 127 different bills are languishing in the hands of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who has the absolute power to bring legislation to the floor of the Senate. Or not.

It’s the “or not” that has vexed Democrats and most Americans of both parties who want something done right now about many issues especially gun violence and election security. And it’s not even close.

In the case of gun violence, a recent NPR-PBS Newshour-Marist poll shows that 89% of Americans support enhanced background checks, including 84% of Republicans. Even the Republican lieutenant governor in ruby red Texas who boasts a 100% NRA rating says we must include private “stranger-to-stranger” gun sales in background checks. And, according to a Fox News poll, two-thirds of Americans support an assault weapons ban and nearly three-fourths support a national “red flag” law. That’s right – Fox News. If you are a gun-loving Republican who thinks nothing should be done about gun violence, you can be as stubborn as you want. Just know that you are now in the minority of your own party.

In the case of election security, a 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that over 75% of both Democrats and Republicans favor such measures as keeping a paper trail for each vote and performing a post-election audit even if it slows down results reporting. Whether you hold President Trump accountable or not, the Mueller Report makes it crystal clear, and politicians in both parties agree, that Russia most certainly meddled in the 2016 election and intends to do so again in 2020. And, individual states just don’t have the money or resources to combat this themselves.

So, how can Mitch McConnell be a one-man roadblock to the things Americans want? Very simply because he can. The Senate allows him to. The Senate majority leader holds astonishing power, none of which is laid out in the Constitution. Chief among these powers is the ability to set the agenda for the body, decide when it is in session, and decide which measures will be debated and voted on. One person decides all this and more. Whether by design or neglect the Founders did not address how the Senate would run itself or who would be in charge. Appointing leaders among Senate members and the power they wield has developed gradually and organically since about 1920.

Mr. McConnell has refused to take up House-passed legislation on hot-button issues because he says the president has not told him what bills he will support. This is a dangerous game to play with an erratic president who changes his position from one day to the next. Mr. McConnell’s stance precludes senators from debating and voting on legislation that is currently favored by most Americans and effectively transfers more power to the executive branch and away from Congress. This is not what the Founders wanted. Congress was always meant to be a co-equal branch, and even “first among equals” in the parlance of Thomas Jefferson.  

To be fair, the Senate was always meant to be a calming influence on the House and the vagaries of shifting popular opinion. George Washington called it the “saucer that cools the tea.” The Founders provided that senators would stand for election every six years while representatives would stand every two years, making them more susceptible to short term swings in popular opinion while the Senate could afford to take the long view.

So, in one sense you can say that the Senate is doing exactly what it is supposed to do in regards to gun violence and election security. It is cooling the hot debate emanating from the House. But in another sense the Senate could just as effectively cool the tea by working with the House on compromise legislation and then bringing the legislation up for debate and subsequently voting it down if that is its desire. That is how it is supposed to work. But in this dysfunctional political climate in which we find ourselves, this is unlikely to happen. Many senators simply do not want an unpopular vote on their record. It is more politically expedient to simply not take up the issue. Mr. McConnell does not want to risk angering this mercurial president by forcing a veto and possible override.

This idea that you can’t consider legislation unless you know exactly how the president feels about it is a relatively new historical phenomenon and not a very attractive one. The president typically sets the broad national agenda and Congress attempts to follow it through legislative action. When you go back in history to the introduction of the Senate majority leader position in 1925 with Calvin Coolidge (R) in the White House, there have been 30 instances of the Senate majority leader belonging to the same party as the president. This did not stop Congress from doing its job and sending legislation to the president he might not like. According to the Congressional Record, in these 30 different Congresses, a total of 1,143 bills came to the president from a Senate controlled by the same party and were vetoed. Forty-four were overridden by Congress. Presumably the presidents didn’t like the 1,143 bills sent to them, but Congress sent them anyway. This is how our democracy is supposed to work. The president vetoed them as he had every right to do. But Congress overrode some of them, which is their right. Under the stewardship of Mitch McConnell, this Congressional right has been stopped in its tracks.

The majority leader has no constitutional right to withhold legislation from being considered. He has the right to do this by Senate rule and Senate rule alone. Those rules can be changed. Because he has taken political gamesmanship to a whole new level, it is hard to make the case that Mitch McConnell is still a patriot. He may have enjoyed that status at one time but no more. He is now derisively known as Moscow Mitch and clearly and unabashedly puts party over country just like when he said that he would do everything in his power to make sure Barack Obama was a one-term president even before he took office. While most political opponents wish a new president well, as was done with Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell was proud to blindly sabotage Mr. Obama’s agenda whether it made sense for America or not.

All of us had the chance to vote for Mr. Trump or his opponent for president in 2016. Like it or not he is president now and has the constitutional right to shape foreign and domestic policy and represent all of us on the world stage. However, not many of us, and certainly no Maryland citizen, got a chance to vote for Mr. McConnell or his opponent in the 2014 Kentucky senatorial election. And we certainly have no voice on who the leaders of the Senate will be. Putting it into terms that Mr. McConnell will understand, his actions (or more precisely his lack of action) has made us disenfranchised voters, and as such we now have every right to meddle in the Kentucky Senate election in 2020.

Since Mr. McConnell is a leading proponent of money-is-free-speech, which helped introduce dark money into politics and all the vitriol that comes with it, I invite all Maryland citizens who feel that Mr. McConnell has abused his power, is ambivalent to the will of the people, and is kowtowing too much to this erratic president to join me and make a donation to the campaign of his 2020 Kentucky senatorial opponent, Amy McGrath (D), a former 20-year Marine Corps fighter pilot at https://amymcgrath.com/. Then we should write to our own senators asking that the Senate curtail the power of majority leader, no matter the party, starting with the next Congress in 2021 before this sad spectacle repeats itself. The Senate gave the majority leader this unfettered power and they can and should take it away. A better model to guide the activities of the Senate would be a panel of three senior senators from each party. Ties would be broken by the vice president. This would still give the majority party the upper hand but take such crucial decision making out of the hands of one person not elected by the vast majority of Americans.

All I Want for Labor Day is an Increase in the Federal Minimum Wage

By Gary Bennett

As seen in the Frederick News-Post Monday, September 2, 2019

Labor Day has been the poor step-sister of federal holidays for a while now. Most people know it as the defacto last day of summer – one last chance for a picnic and pool party. But it wasn’t always that way. The creation of Labor Day in the late 1800’s was a big deal and the logical result of the labor movement that paralleled the industrial revolution. It paid homage to the men and women who built this country.

There is no doubt that the country needed labor to be more assertive in the early days. The labor movement of the late 1800s addressed vexing issues such as extremely low pay, unsafe working conditions, 12- and 15-hour workdays, 7-day workweeks, and most harrowing of all, child labor.  Because so much labor was needed to power the industrial revolution, workers soon gained the upper hand with management and did not shy away from demanding more money, less hours, and an end to child labor. The first strike was called by workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894 and was an unmitigated success for labor. Soon, strikes all over the country led to the end of child labor, increased wages, a 40-hour work week, and the advent of overtime pay. The old saying is absolutely true that if you enjoy your weekends, you have labor unions to thank.

But today, only about 10% of all workers are covered by unions. Most of us are “at will” employees, meaning we can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. There are many reasons for this shift including deregulation of many industries, technological advances, restructuring and plant closings, and the availability of more and better foreign goods. So, what would the founders of Labor Day and Grover Cleveland, the democratic president who signed it into law, think about the current state of relations between labor and management? I think they would be surprised that the pendulum has swung so far in the favor of management. 

Nothing drives this point home as much as the debate over an increase in the federal minimum wage. With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the U.S. minimum wage was initially set at 25 cents per hour for covered workers. Since then, it has been raised 22 separate times, most recently in July 2009 to $7.25 an hour. The U.S. minimum wage has not been raised since 2009, the longest time the U.S. has gone without a minimum wage increase. It took a democrat in the White House and a democratic Congress in both houses to get this accomplished in 2009. It is also true that the federal minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Its peak was in 1968 when the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. That is worth $11.39 in 2017 dollars. Since then, the minimum wage’s real value has been in decline.

On July 18 of this year, the Raise the Wage Act passed the U.S House of Representatives, a bill that would double the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour in increments by 2025. President Trump does not support this measure, and with the dynamics of the republican-led Senate being what they are, it is extremely unlikely it will be considered any time soon. But the measure is important politically as a precursor as to what could happen with a democratic president and Congress in 2021.

It is difficult to argue that all Americans should not be paid at least a living wage that will pull them out of poverty. The main argument against raising the federal minimum wage is the threat of job loss as labor becomes too expensive especially for small business. Putting aside the fact that federal minimum wage laws have always included exemptions for small business (I remember I made 90 cents per hour at a small local theater chain in 1979 when the federal minimum swage was $2.30), job loss has just not happened in an appreciable way over the long history of the minimum wage. A large body of research that looked at 138 minimum wage increases at the federal and state levels between 1979 and 2016 found they basically had no effect on low-wage jobs. More and more nonpartisan economists and business owners have increasingly accepted that some level of minimum wage can work well, coming at a minimal cost to jobs. Most importantly, most Americans, including republicans, support an increase in the minimum wage.

When you combine these facts with the estimation of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that 1.3 million people will be lifted above the federal poverty level by 2025 with the $15 minimum wage, it is difficult to understand why we haven’t moved in this direction already. Political scorekeeping is one reason, of course, but another is the possibility that the same number – 1.3 million people – could lose their jobs. Past research is one thing, but the U.S. has never contemplated doubling the minimum wage is such a short period of time. The CBO acknowledges they are not sure what will happen, also saying that job loss could be zero. Nowhere in their analysis, however, do they talk about businesses failing because of paying an increased minimum wage. That position thrown about by politicians and pundits is pure hyperbole, has not happened in the past, and should not be believed by educated citizens.  

Of course, most states have their own minimum wage laws. There is a strong argument to make that states are better equipped to set these wage floors because labor and job conditions from state to state vary so much. Five southern states have felt it unnecessary to set a state minimum wage at all – Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina – and have fought vociferously to end federal minimum wages protections. Two states – Wyoming and Georgia – have minimum wage rates below federal levels so they must adhere to the federal rate. Fourteen states have laws that set the minimum wage at the federal level. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia set their rates higher than the federal rate. Currently, Massachusetts and Washington state have the highest minimum wage rate at $11.00 per hour.

What about progressive Maryland? Earlier this year, Maryland became just the sixth state to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Maryland’s current minimum wage is $10.10, and the new policy will gradually raise the wage floor to $15 by 2025. The law was passed by the General Assembly overriding the veto of Governor Hogan. The new law will benefit about 573,000 workers in Maryland who currently earn less than $15 – about 22% of the state’s workforce, according to the National Employment Law Project.

In my view an increase in the federal minimum wage is long overdue. An economy that has been growing steadily since our recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 should benefit everyone. When the economy grows and unemployment is low and labor is tight, wages should increase.  That has not been the case. Hence, the debate rages over the wealth gap between rich and poor, white and black, immigrants and longer-term Americans, and management and labor.

A handy measuring stick for the wealth gap in 2019 is the CEO pay ratio, which many corporations now have to disclose as a public-owned company. It measures the compensation earned by “average workers” to their chief executive officer. Since it is so new, historical comparisons can’t be made. But the ratios are striking, ranging from 100-to-1 to sometimes topping 1,000-to-1 at companies like Walmart and McDonalds.  You may argue that entry level-type jobs at these companies were meant to be just that – entry level – and not meant to last long term. I would argue these types of jobs are fast becoming the only types of jobs that can be found in a certain segment of our population in this outsourced, gig economy we find ourselves in.

The Peter Principal states that employees will rise in the hierarchy of a company or the economy in general until they reach a level of incompetence. Like it or not, we have to accept that for some people a job at Walmart or McDonald’s is the best they will do. Don’t they deserve a decent living wage? Free market capitalism just doesn’t do the job sometimes and needs a little help.  I’ll go one step farther and say that companies that say they can’t afford to pay a living wage perhaps should not exist. And I say this as a small employer from earlier in my career who paid the federal minimum wage. Employers who pay low wages force their workers to turn to governmental safety programs at significant cost to taxpayers. Gradually phasing in a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would lift the pay of tens of millions of workers, reverse decades of growing pay inequity, bring new customers into markets they couldn’t afford until now, reduce costs associated with employee turnover, and lessen dependence on social safety nets. It’s time the Senate and president act.