Tom Latham, despite representing a swing district, has signed on to some rather extreme pieces of legislation in Washington DC this session. Latham has co-sponsored a bill that would gut what remains of the Wagner Act by passing so-called “right-to work” legislation, (HR 697) Many Republicans in the Iowa State House have taken similarly despicable stands. Latham has also signed on to HR 2380. This bill would permanently repeal the estate tax. Apparently, Tom Latham thinks working Iowans don’t pay enough taxes while Paris Hilton is paying far too much.
Latham is supporting other extreme legislation as well, including HR 618, which seeks to undermine Roe v. Wade. It’s clear that Tom Latham supports a far-right wing agenda that is out of touch with what his constituents support. In fact, it’s so far right-wing, it seems even more extreme than Steve King. However, when one considers that the National Journal ranked Latham as even farther from the mainstream than King, it’s not a surprise. One hopes that despite a slow start to fundraising that the eventual nominee for the 4th District is able to defeat an extremist like Tom Latham.
All signs are positive that Governor Culver will sign the collective bargaining bill that will give public employees the same rights as those in the private sector. Iowa Progress previously commented on this bill before and Culver’s reluctance to sign it-although perhaps displaying the some of the same pique that the post attributes to Chet. What is clear is that the bill is a good piece of legislation that will help all Iowans.
Culver has been a good governor so far and shown notable leadership on issues such as stem cell research. While his equivocation on this issue was less than admirable, what matters is that he is coming down on the right side at the end of the day and will ensure that Iowa’s public employees get a fair deal.
David Yepsen was singing the praises of Chet Culver today for undermining efforts to allow teachers and other public employees the same rights as private sector employees. Apparently if this happens, there’s a chance that teachers may negotiate for smaller class sizes as part of collective bargaining and why would any Iowa school want smaller class sizes? Except, of course, that there is a definitive link between class size and academic performance among students. Yepsen also brings up the scary fact that the collective bargaining bill would mean more binding arbitration which Yepsen is sure means higher costs to government. However, Ed Tibbets in an exhaustive piece for the Quad City Times shows that binding arbitration only happens rarely. In fact, it only occurs in 1% of all contract disputes in Iowa. In fact, binding arbitration may work against teachers and other public employees union. While opponents of the bills claim that in arbitration cases involving school districts, teachers prevail against management 57% of the time (although includes a mere 63 cases that occurred over the past 5 years), the Quad City Times’ review of arbitration cases in Scott County shows the contrary and management prevailing over public employees almost 60% of the time.
However, this isn’t stopping the fearmongering. Far-right organizations like Iowans for Tax Relief are claiming (without any data to back up their claims, of course) this could lead to disastrous rises in property taxes, leading Iowa to become more like such states as Maryland, Kansas and Maine and less like such states as Alabama, Arkansas and New Mexico (which incidentally not only have the lowest property taxes in the nation but rank in the bottom for household income, percentage of those living in poverty, employment and just about every other indicator of economic and social health available). So why is Chet going against fairness for teachers and other public employees (along with virtually every Democrat in the legislature) to bathe in the good graces of Iowans for Tax Relief and David Yepsen?
One assumes this is political posturing, designed to strengthen Culver’s hand in his dealings with the legislature. After all, as the Sioux City Journal notes “Culver raised no objections with the substance of the bill, just the process by which it passed. Spokesman Brad Anderson said Culver was ‘not pleased’ that he wasn’t notified earlier, and felt the public should have been included in the debate.” This isn’t politics, it’s personal pique.
As a result, Culver’s annoyance with Mike Gronstal and Pat Murphy, he’s fanned the flames of this issue in a way that has energized Republicans and hurt working people. Iowa Democrats have waited 40 years to pass progressive legislation and for Culver to show such pettiness by standing in the way is disgraceful and sullies an otherwise admirable record as Governor. As Jack Kibbie notes, one imagines that Culver will support the collective bargaining bill “because of his future. He’s running on the Democratic ticket, I presume.” But if Culver continues to stand against guaranteeing public employees the same rights as their private sector counterparts, he’ll be as good a fit on the Republican ticket as on the Democratic one.
As part of the minimum wage increase that was passed by the Iowa State Legislature last year, Iowa’s minimum wage will go up from $6.20 to $7.25 on January 1st. This marks one of the many advances made in Des Moines during the last legislative session when Democrats finally controlled both chambers of the Iowa State Legislature and Terrace Hill for the first time in 40 years.
Considering the accomplishments of the past legislative session, not just on minimum wage, but on civil rights, stem cells and a host of other issues, there should be a lot to look forward to in 2008. Although everyone is caught up in the upcoming Iowa Caucuses, it’s worth remembering that no matter who wins and who loses on January 3, it doesn’t matter as long as Democrats rally behind the eventual nominee. Iowa has made a lot of progress over the past year but it can make a lot more with a Democratic President in the White House.
State Representative Dawn Pettengill left the Democratic caucus for the Republican caucus today. The Register has the story from Chris Rants’s press conference, which just happened:
The change cuts the Democratic majority in the House to 53 seats and gives minority Republicans 47 seats. It takes 51 votes to pass legislation.
Pettengill had battled publicly with the House Democratic caucus this year over issues such as labor union fees and the cigarette tax increase. She had indicated publicly she might consider leaving the caucus, although she had suggested she was more likely to become an independent.
“The House Democratic leadership pursued an agenda which veered far from the principles for which my constituents and I stand,” she said in a statement. “My decision gives me the best opportunity to represent the values of my constituents.”
This is going to make progressives — particularly the ones I know who knocked doors for her during the last campaign — pretty unhappy. Pettengill is known for her emotional outbursts, and my sense is that she perceives her district to be more conservative than it actually is.
I posted a while back about why I didn’t think Pettengill was going to defect. It turns out I was wrong. This kind of transition, from the majority to the minority (particularly when it looks like the Republicans will likely remain in the minority through next campaign cycle) is surprising, but Pettengill planted the seed for a defection months ago.
As an aside, this comes as a double-disappointment for many progressives, who were hoping that Rants planned to announce his resignation today. Rumors that he will resign have been circulating for months, and there is no word yet on whether Pettengill’s switch will influence his decision on that one way or the other.
A few days ago, The Register wrote an article documenting State Representative Dawn Pettengill’s dissatisfaction with the Democratic leadership in the State House. Here’s a snippet:
“I’m just trying to get through this term as a Democrat,” said Pettengill, the former mayor of her hometown of Mount Auburn who is now in her third year in the Iowa House. “People elected me as a Democrat, and I would not change during a term, that’s for sure.”
Her indecision leaves Democratic leaders questioning whether they should recruit a replacement candidate for the 2008 primary, and Republican leaders wondering if she might be on their team by the general election.
Will she defect? Well, she says she won’t during this term. In general, though, I’m not too worried about it. Pettengill has always seemed concerned with her ability to get elected in a district that she perceives as leaning more Republican than Democrat. She has developed a reputation (partly, but not wholly, deserved) for being emotionally volatile. Although she has condemned other legislators’ pet projects and voted against them, she is somewhat famous for her own pet projects: last year, she sponsored legislation to ban stores from selling sex toys to minors, and this year, she was the main proponent of the bill that recently passed preventing Iowa from having any business dealings with businesses supporting the genocide in Darfur. (I don’t mean to claim that either of these bills is bad policy, but neither is exactly in the front of most Iowans’ minds.)
The Register notes a few key places where Pettengill differs from the Democratic leadership in the House, but none of them are cut and dry reasons for a defection to the Republicans (or even to the Independent ticket):
But the strain of the last month has taken a serious toll as she struggled with her dislike of bills dear to many Democrats — raising the minimum wage (she voted yes after some reluctance), upping the cigarette tax (she voted no), campaign finance reform (she may vote no), and allowing public employee unions to charge nonunion members a “fair share” fee (she firmly intends to vote no).
On raising the minimum wage, she did end up voting yes, and the political realities in her district meant that “some reluctance” on the vote was smart. On voting against the cigarette tax, she justifies her decision for liberal (dare I say Democratic) reasons:
During a caucus meeting on the cigarette tax two weeks ago, Pettengill wept as she explained that when she was 19 years old, she found herself living on her own with a baby, balancing college classes and a job. She couldn’t afford cigarettes, but they were such a critical source of comfort that she sacrificed food to buy them.
She objects to a cigarette tax because it is increcibly regressive — it takes money disproportionately from the poor, and, because it is a flat fee, it takes a greater percentage of the disposable income of a poor person than it does a rich person. Yes, it internalizes an externality, yadda yadda yadda; but there is a principled, liberal argument to be made against it. Frankly, I was surprised more members didn’t express that opinion. Maybe only a small minority of the party holds this view, but it isn’t because they are the more conservative members of the party.
On campaign finance reform, it really isn’t clear that all of the Democratic leadership are fully supporting the VOICE bill. Good liberals generally like it (despite the short-term strategic disadvantages it may present to parties currently in the majority of the legislature), but this isn’t exactly an issue that everyone is closely aligned over.
And finally, on FairShare, it disappoints many labor activists that Pettengill does not support it, but again, there is a fair amount of diversity among Democrats on this subject. Some have more union shops in their districts than others, and some have different opinions of labor unions than others. Our Democratic State Senator, Tom Reilly, voted against FairShare, and he isn’t leaving the party anytime soon. Again, it’s an issue where some people within the labor movement are doubting policies like this, so it isn’t’ only conservatives who oppose it.
So is it really just the House leadership’s fault that Pettengill is disgruntled, as others have claimed? No. The House leadership is doing its job. Their job is to push a Democratic agenda in the legislature, and they have to keep their members in line whenever they can. They’re getting results, and, unless Pettengill does end up defecting, no one will even remember this story in six months.
The Quad City Times is reporting that the Fair Share proposal for non-union employees to pay their fair share of the benefits they receive due to working in union shops might be dead for the legislative session. The Republican Party has been solid in their opposition to this measure. It’s part of their anti-labor and anti-working families agenda. One hopes that enough votes can be mustered up in the next few days to pass Fair Share and to help puncture the myth that weak labor unions are somehow correlated with a strong business environment. After all, aren’t “right to work” states like Mississippi and Wyoming centers of economic growth? If Iowa wants to attract new businesses, emulating Mississippi is not the wisest way to do so.
And frankly, the opposition to Fair Share has nothing to do with attracting businesses to the state. As a University of Iowa economist pointed out recently, “why would a unionized company care how many of its workers paid how much to the union?” The opposition to fair share isn’t about making sure that people can avoid paying for benefits they receive or about attracting business to Iowa, it’s about Republicans who want to hurt organized labor and working families in the state of Iowa. It’s a shame that even with a Democratic legislature, the Republicans may still be able to impede such an important piece of legislation.
Throughout most of the world, Labor Day is celebrated on May 1st to commemorate the aftermath of the so-called “Haymarket Riots” when a mass strike for an eight hour working day in Chicago was crushed by the police. The police used a bomb that was thrown at a line of policemen that killed one and fatally wounded six more (thrown either by an agent provocateur or by a lone crazed anarchist) as an excuse to fire into a crowd of peaceable demonstrators. The deaths of the policemen served as a pretext to round up the city’s labor leaders who were put on trial in front of a packed jury as accessories to murder, despite the fact there was no evidence of any connecting them to the deaths of the policemen. Seven were sentenced to death, and although the sentences of two of them were commuted to life in prison, four innocent men were murdered by the State of Illinois (and a fifth committed suicide on the eve of his execution).
How do Mary Lundby and the other State Senate Republicans want to commemorate this hallowed day for the Labor Movement? They’ve introduced a bill to declare May 1 as Iowa’s Right To Work Day to remember the passage of Iowa’s anti-labor “Right To Work” Act. The resolution also praises the Taft-Hartley act, which enabled states to pass “right to work” legislation, and is the most anti-Labor legislation in American history. Taft-Hartley was described by Harry Truman as “a clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society.” As contemptuous as this resolution is, it’s just a resolution and merely a symbolic statement. However, it’s part of an ongoing effort by the Republican Party to undermine the Labor Movement and the rights of working people that goes back beyond Taft-Hartley. But Iowa Republicans aren’t limiting themselves to symbolic gestures.
The Republicans in the State House are also opposing the Fair Share Law in Iowa. This merely mandates that “all workers who receive union-negotiated benefits contribute to the cost of providing those benefits.” However, the Republicans claim that this will destroy business in Iowa. This is baseless assertion that was easily refuted by Peter Fisher, a University of Iowa economist, who pointed out, “Why would a unionized company care how many of its workers paid how much to the union? I can only conclude that firms who assert that they will not come to Iowa because of fair share are looking for a low-wage location and want weak labor unions to help ensure that it will remain a low-wage location.” It’s a shame that Republicans are continuing their efforts to undermine workers’ rights and thumbing their noses at those who actually work to help Iowa’s working families.
David Yepsen’s column today makes the argument that Democrats in the state legislature should avoid changing anything to do with Iowa’s right to work law or risk losing control in 2008. He asserts that “Polls show overwhelming support for such worker freedom.”
A few weeks ago, I started getting strange calls on my Blackberry from a number I didn’t recognize. I didn’t answer the first few times the number popped up. Finally, after it was clear that this person wanted to talk to me and would not leave a message, I answered the next call I got, and it turned out to be someone in a call center in Missouri (I think it was Missouri) taking a poll. It was clear from the first question (something to do with protections for “the right to life,” without saying what the “right to life” was) that the poll of Iowa voters was being conducted by some conservative operation.
Question three, word for word, was “Do you support Iowa’s Right To Work Law?”
All of the survey questions were slanted to create a pattern of “Yes” answers (that is, when they wanted someone to say they did not support a particular law, they would ask “Do you disagree with X?” instead of “Do you agree with X?”), and the callers seemed to have been instructed to sound happier when someone answered “Yes” rather than “No.” In a survey like that, of course the vast majority of Iowa voters are going to say “Yes.”
But if you asked them, instead, “Do you think it is important that Iowa workers are able to engage in collective bargaining with their employers?” it seems plausible that an equal number would have said “Yes.” I’m not sure what polls Yepsen has seen on the issue, but I thought at least mentioning how slanted and disingenuous the survey I got was might help get us beyond the discussion of poll numbers.
