strike while the iron is hot
Let’s be clear about one thing: we’re getting a TON of really great stuff out of this legislative session. Marriage equality, paying back the school funding shift, funding for all-day kindergarten (a bigger deal than virtually anyone is giving it credit for), and a budget that, while far from perfect, is worlds better than what we were getting from Tim Pawlenty’s reign of terror or from a Tea-infused GOP-led legislature. These things have come from both the House and Senate, and DFLers in both houses have worked hard on a variety of issues
All that being said, there’s one thing right now that’s an absolute joke, and it belies a complete lack of leadership in the State Senate: the state minimum wage.
The House has already passed a bill to raise the minimum wage above $9.00 per hour (and index it to inflation), and the Senate has a proposal to raise it to something in the $7.00 range. Majority Leader Tom Bakk said recently that he “doesn’t have the votes” to make even that increase happen. This is an absolute joke, and not a particularly funny one. This is a DFL Majority Leader who just helped guide the most contentious piece of social-issue legislation in a generation to success, but can’t whip 34 votes to raise the damned poverty wage to a measly nine bucks an hour?
The joke gets worse, though, because this is also a leadership team that’s pushing to raise legislator pay. Now, don’t get me wrong — legislator pay probably does need to go up. But again, this is an opportunity to permanently change the conversation about legislative pay — want to raise your pay? Raise the minimum wage concurrently. When workers win, legislators get a teeny bit more too. Good luck to future non-DFL-led legislatures ever changing that dynamic, if it were put in place. This Senate leadership is instead taking this opportunity to appear as crass and self-interested as any other set of politicians, when they could be using this chance to tie their own fortunes to the success of Minnesota workers.
To say nothing of the fact that the Senate, while legislatively not that different from the House, is somewhat more immune to political externalities since they’re not up for reelection for three more freaking years.
Just terrible politics, folks. Terrible leadership on this issue. And it’s such an important one for the DFL (and progressives as a distinct group) to be pushing if we want to hang on to these majorities in 2014.
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This is the kind of thing I was starting to talk about in 
