The House Committee on Education and the Workforce convened Wednesday to discuss the Biden administration’s proposed labor rule, which would reportedly make 3.6 million more Americans eligible for overtime pay and protections. The Republican-controlled hearing aimed to stoke fear that increasing wages for people working overtime would destroy our economy.
In order to do this, Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina (most recently known as the angry press conference ghost) began her question time by arguing, at a hearing about Americans who are working overtime, that a lot of Americans don’t want to work … and in order to get ahead, you need to work hard.
Unfortunately, what Miss Conti was talking about is there’s just a lot of people in this country don't want to work, period, and want somebody else to take care of them, and that's not what this country is all about. What we need—we have great opportunities in this country for people to be successful if they want to work hard.
Again: This hearing is about overtime pay. Overtime.
The proposed rule would raise the threshold for salaried employees who would be required to receive overtime from its current $35,568 to about $55,000. This is an attempt by the Biden administration to revive an Obama-era rule that was blocked by a conservative judge.
The Republican Party’s anti-labor ideology is so narrow and obsessive that even when discussing the wages of people working more hours than most, conservatives like Foxx simply resort to pontificating about an imaginary horde of lazy Americans who don’t exist.
Campaign Action
There has been a ton of coverage in recent weeks over a streak of poor 2024 polling for Democrats and Target Smart’s Tom Bonier joins us to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. We talk about what to take from these polls and how to balance them against the much more positive election results we’ve seen this year. We also discuss how early voting data continues to evolve and how Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign will use Ohio’s recent abortion and marijuana referendums to find new persuadable voters next year.
