On this 7th anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helped to close the pay gap between women and men, a reminder that the Republican Party and its 2016 presidential candidates still don’t want to make sure equal pay for equal work happens in practice.
Please don’t hold your breath, because Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and the rest don’t plan on doing anything about the gender pay gap — and Jeb Bush still may not know what the Paycheck Fairness Act even is:
- Here’s Donald Trump on equal pay when asked about it this fall: “I have given women more opportunity than I would say virtually anybody in the construction industry…I respect women, I love women, I cherish women.” Pressed further, Trump said: “You’re gonna make the same if you do as good a job”
- Ted Cruz has called the Paycheck Fairness Act “a political show vote” that has “nothing to do with actually improving the situation of women in the workplace.”
- Marco Rubio disparaged the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as “nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers collect their fees and file lawsuits.” Rubio’s continued to insist that equal pay proposals are “geared towards making it easier to sue an employer” and not “going to solve the core of the problem.”
- Jeb Bush? If you ask him off the cuff, there’s a good chance Jeb still has no idea what the Paycheck Fairness Act is. But his new official equal pay stance is that “there are [already] laws to make it so.”
- Chris Christie has claimed he’s for paycheck fairness… but why does he keep killing pay equity legislation?
- Rand Paul’s take on the gender pay gap? “I think that some of the victimology and all of this other stuff is trumped up.”
- In fact, Paul is actually more worried about men than women: “You know, I don’t see so much that women are downtrodden…I worry about our young men sometimes because I think the women really are out-competing the men in our world.”
- Paul‘s top-line takeaway: We shouldn’t “dumb down” women’s successes for “political purposes.”
Published: Jan 29, 2016