House supporters of the Protect America’s Workforce Act, sponsored by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Me.), have the requisite 218 member signatures on a discharge petition to force a vote on the measure which would overturn President Donald Trump’s executive order wiping out union rights for thousands of federal workers.
The media is tagging the successful petition drive as a rare example of “bipartisanship” in the House, where the GOP holds a narrow majority.
Five Republicans and 216 Democrats (including non-voting delegates) inked the petition. The act has 226 co-sponsors – 217 Democrats (including non-voting delegates) and nine Republicans.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) sponsored the bill in the Senate. It has 47 co-sponsors — 44 Democrats, two independents, and one Republican.
The media often labels legislation “bipartisan” even if only a handful of lawmakers from one party back a bill supported by the other party.
The online Cambridge Dictionary defines “bipartisan” as “involving or having the support of both sides, especially of political parties.” But it seems to me that when only a handful of legislators from one party join all or most of the lawmakers from the other party in backing (or opposing) a measure, that’s bipartisanship only in a technical sense.
Thus, calling the petition (and the act to restore union rights) “bipartisan” is a pretty big stretch – at least to me. It also seems to imply that Democrats and Republicans are standing in solidarity in labor’s corner, when only a tiny fraction of Republicans are.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic brass strongly support the Protect America’s Workforce Act. So does the Democratic caucus.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and the House GOP bigwigs tried to derail the bill. Based on the few Republican members who co-sponsored the legislation and/or signed the discharge petition, almost all of his caucus share their leaders’ – and Trump’s – disdain for restoring union rights for government employees.
Too, party leaders — both Republicans and Democrats — sometimes will green-light members facing tough reelection bids to vote the other way when it’s certain a bill will ultimately go nowhere, or has plenty of votes to pass. The idea is to help them burnish their “independent” creds to voters back home.
Veteran Kentucky labor activist Kirk Gillenwaters gets how the two parties stack up on unions. “One party is almost in total opposition to anything that will move organized labor forward,” said Gillenwaters, Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans president and a United Auto Workers retiree.
He meant the Republican party.
While most union members still vote Democratic, Gillenwaters concedes that many in Kentucky and nationwide are Trump fans and vote accordingly. “This has been the most hostile administration to workers in our lifetimes,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said of Team Trump. Gillenwaters agrees and invites union members who lean MAGA-ward to take a gander at the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Scorecard online. It shows where House and Senate “lawmakers stand on issues important to working families, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, freedom to join a union, improving workplace safety, and more.”
Let’s crunch some numbers from the most current Scorecard (2023). Lawmakers are graded from zero to 100 percent.
- The average Republican House member score is six percent.
- The average score for House Democrats is 99 percent.
- Republican senators average three percent, Democrats 100 percent.
Let’s get Kentucky specific:
- Sen. Mitch McConnell (Republican) – 0% in 2023, 17% over time in office
- Sen. Rand Paul (R) – 0% in 2023, 10% over time in office
- Rep. Andy Barr (R, 6th District) – 10% in 2023, 10% over time in office
- James Comer (R, 1st) – 10% in 2023, 12% over time in office
- Brett Guthrie (R. 2nd) – 10% in 2023, 12% over time in office
- Thomas Massie (R, 4th) – 10% in 2023, 15% over time in office
- Morgan McGarvey (D, 3rd) – 100% in 2023, 100% over time in office
- Hal Rogers (R, 5th) – 10% in 2023, 15% over time in office
Gillenwaters challenges union members to look past political rhetoric and media definitions of “bipartisan” to focus on “how politicians vote and not what they profess.”
True confession time: I’m a lifelong Democrat who packs a union retiree card. Even so, I fervently wish my party was a true social democratic labor party along the lines of strong, viable labor parties in democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. But Democratic presidents, governors, and national and state legislators are, by a long shot, more likely to back unions and union issues than Republicans are at any level.
History, the subject I taught in a community college for two dozen years, is clear as well. From the presidency of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to today, support for the American labor movement and its goals has been anything but truly bipartisan. “History will tell you that the Democrats ramrodded every meaningful piece of legislation for the benefit of working people,” said the late J.R. Gray, a former Democratic state representative, Machinists union official, and Kentucky labor secretary.
The evidence is clear: while the media may call a few Republicans supporting a single bill “bipartisan support for labor,” only one national party is consistently and forcefully on the side of unions and working people: the Democrats.
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