Louisiana Voice

Remember a couple of weeks back when I wrote about how the so-called Christian, family-values Repugnantcan party had kicked working Louisianans in the teeth by REFUSING TO INCREASE the minimum wage?

Remember how I pointed out that 2009 was the year the minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour and has not budged a cent since then in Louisiana?

Remember how Rep. Roger William Wilder III (R-Denham Springs) bellyached about how increasing the minimum wage would create an undesired ripple effect?

Wellll, by golly, that ripple effect didn’t seem to matter too much to the Committee on House and Governmental Affairs which voted unanimously to report HOUSE BILL 1201 favorably.

HB 1201, by Rep. John R. “Big John” Illg, Jr. (R-Harahan), awards state elected officials with HEFTY PAY RAISES, including a whopping 40 percent bump for the governor while other statewide officials (lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, insurance and agricultural commissioners and state treasurer) would get increases of 35.7 percent. College and university presidents would get 35 percent increases.

Rep. John R. “Big John” Illg, Jr.

All those, I would remind you, come on the heels of a refusal to even allow an increase in the minimum wage to get out of committee. Dead on arrival.

Now, you certainly don’t need me to remind you that’s just not a good look. You don’t need me to remind you that you’re hurting right now. You are already reminded every time you fill up at the gas pump, pay a utility bill, buy weekly groceries—not to mention other incidentals like car repairs, college tuition, clothing, housing—you know: the little things we need to survive.

Now, imagine you don’t make your current salary but instead, are trying to get by on $7.25 an hour…

Thom Hartmann, a political writer on a much larger stage than mine, posed a question to his national audience some 20 years ago. The question was this:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, he said in a column published today (April 28), “nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.”

Meanwhile, he says, “Since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.”

When Hartman posed the seemingly rhetorical question of why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years, he provided several reasons:

• Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies
• Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry
• Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street
• Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers
• Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers
• Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations
• Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA
• Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations

“Until we get big money out of politics and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors,” he concluded, “the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly-owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself—except to simply add the Repugnantcans don’t give a damn about working Americans and that’s the unvarnished truth of the matter.