Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 08:42 pm
Now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress, things should be happening! We should finally get a jobs bill and the minimum wage will be raised, since both Republican leaders (Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) claim to care about the “stagnation of wages”. Oh, wait, they shared their plan today and it’s to take private healthcare away from millions and try more trickle up economics on the backs of America’s middle class. So that should go well.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was not impressed. “Instead of voting on GOP bills to protect millionaires and big corporations and repeal health coverage and patient protections for millions of Americans – Americans want us to come together and immediately address these priorities,” a press release from her office reads. Pelosi challenged Republicans to work with Democrats to help the middle class with policies that will actually help… the middle class instead of the top 2%. Here are a few of Leader Pelosi’s ideas per her office:
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Increasing the minimum wage for hardworking Americans. More than 70 percent of Americans and 600 prominent economists agree that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour is the right action to spur economic growth and stability by: Increasing the wages of 25 million people; Creating 85,000 jobs; Lifting from 5 to 6 million people out of poverty; Benefitting 1 million veterans; Raising the wages of 15 million working women; Providing women with equal pay for equal work, many of them co-breadwinners or the primary breadwinners in their households, who are paid only 78 cents for every dollarpaid to their male counterparts. Providing paid sick leave; Creating jobs by making investments to build roads and bridges.
Unfortunately, we can’t divide the country up and give McConnell and Boehner’s “leadership” to the folks who voted for them. Those folks will always be protected by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi who fight for the middle class and the working poor, even when they vote consistently against their own best interests.
Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to let Boehner and McConnell get away with their continued destruction of the middle class in order to benefit their owner donors without calling them out on it. Pelosi’s agenda is far from what would have been considered partisan pre-Obama. But now that Republicans are far, far right – so far to the right that many of our elected officials can no longer determine what is based on reality and appear to be functioning in Plato’s shadow world where Obama is around every corner, things like raising the minimum wage and having Social Security are no longer things Republicans can get behind. The Republicans can’t agree with Democrats on anything, because they are not in office to be fiscally conservative or save family values. They are there to make sure the Koch Brothers and Hobby Lobby make more money.
Will the Republican base (aka, a hefty percentage of white males it seems and the women who marry them) see through this scam? Not likely. They are voting on nostalgia and emotion. Reactionary hysterics who can’t stand the idea of progress if it means they don’t get all of the goodies and get to choose how to dole them out.
Your conservative white male has spoken, and so now, 1 million people will be tossed off of health insurance and McConnell and Boehner are just getting warmed up. No worries, though. They’ll find a way to blame their actions on Obama, because if there’s one thing Republicans never do, it’s take responsibility for their actions and policies. And that includes their base, who use Medicare and yet want the government to keep their hands off of it and love Kynect but hate Obamacare. These are emotional children, throwing a long temper tantrum because other people want the same rights and privileges as they have.
To prove just how mad they are, they punished everyone by voting for Republicans who are against the very things they want. Children.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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