Senate GOP Kills Equal Pay Bills, Hopes Women Don't Notice

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by: Colorado Pols

Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg.

The Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports on the death yesterday afternoon of two bills meant to help women in Colorado close the persistent gap in earnings between themselves and their male colleagues in the GOP-controlled Senate State Affairs Committee:

Three men voted over the objections of two other men Wednesday to kill the two major efforts of the 2016 Colorado Legislature’s session aimed at shrinking the gap in pay between women and men.

After lengthy debates the past two weeks in the House of Representatives on the subject, the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee quickly dispatched of a pair of proposals aimed at ensuring that state contractors follow federal equal-pay laws and to ban employers from asking the salary history of job applicants. Both died on 3-2 party-line votes of Republicans over Democrats…

You’ve got to love the stock photo Sealover included with his story, which tells the story all by itself:

Although pay equity is a problem nationally even 50 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act in the early 1960s, statistics show the problem is in fact worse in the state of Colorado than the national average. In Colorado, women earn an average of 78 cents on the dollar their male counterparts make–a gap that advocates say can’t be explained away by the usual presumptions about the lives of women made by…well, made by men.

The Senate State Affairs Committee’s all-male Republican majority included Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, the very same GOP Senator who had apologized just a couple of days earlier for referring to a female Senate colleague as “eye candy” during debate on a moribund bill to tax corporate earnings stashed away in overseas tax havens. The same female Senator in fact presented the second of the two bills that died yesterday, the irony of which dripped from the hearing even though no one had the boldness to say it into a hot mic.

Nationally, as we know from the headlines, women voters are in the process of being repelled en masse by Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. Trump just yesterday committed perhaps the worst in a seemingly endless procession of woman-alienating gaffes, suggesting and then retreating from the suggestion that women should receive “some form of punishment” for having an abortion. Trump’s gleeful sexist attacks on any woman with the temerity to question him have given him favorability numbers among women somewhere in the post-execution Ted Bundy range. Even if Trump self-destructs in the next few weeks, he has ripped open one of the GOP’s biggest scabs–and we feel pretty confident that Ted Cruz won’t be able to heal it.

Bottom line: if you can’t make the connection for voters from Trump’s over-the-top sexism to Jerry Sonnenberg’s “eye candy,” you should get out of politics. The fractured Republican presidential race is increasingly forecast to have serious downticket implications for Republicans, putting the U.S. Senate, and in some more boostery Democratic circles, even the U.S. House in play.

If we were a Republican under Colorado’s Gold Dome, we’d be every bit as nervous.

8 thoughts on “Senate GOP Kills Equal Pay Bills, Hopes Women Don’t Notice”

Conserv. Head Banger says:

March 31, 2016 at 12:44 pm

Trump speak his mind; and often inserts foot into mouth before realizing he has fungus & athlete's foot. On the other hand, as I've written on other threads, Cruz is the stealth, anti-woman, candidate. He'll advocate to ban abortion and many forms of birth control. Not my kind of Republican.

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1. BlueCat says:
  
  March 31, 2016 at 1:01 pm
  
  Don't think he's very stealthy. He's very clear about his thousand percent anti-choice stand.
  
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2. Pseudonymous says:
  
  March 31, 2016 at 1:17 pm
  
  What viable Republican candidate for national office is the statement, " He'll advocate to ban abortion and many forms of birth control." not appropriate for?
  
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3. Diogenesdemar says:
  
  March 31, 2016 at 1:24 pm
  
  The "Drümpf speaks his mind" meme is as much a manufactured and preposterous fraud as his university, his historical battlefield golf course, his hairstyle, his business acumen …
  
  Hair Drümpf speaks to gain adulation and affirmation from whatever audience he's posing for — careening widely, from audience to audience to audience and venue to venue. He has no "mind" (just a yuugely awesome mirror … in need of constant polishing.)
  
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  1. BlueCat says:
    
    March 31, 2016 at 3:01 pm
    
    Heard an interesting comment. If Trump had bothered to study up on the anti-choicers approved presentation of their views he'd have known you're not supposed to say you'd punish women. You're supposed to say they're victims, yadyadyada and that this is of a piece with his not studying foreign policy issues or anything else. As he gets asked more specific questions, especially going forward into the general if he wins the nomination, it will become increasingly clear that he he doesn't know anything about any of it, not even what a GOP candidate is suposed to say to stay on the right side (in more ways than one) of the various members of their coalition.
    
    What makes this gaffe unique is that he actually felt the need to walk it back. His ignorance and arrogance mean he's bound to make this kind of mistake and then walk it back with increasing frequency. Since his whole thing is never retreat, never apologize, never back down and since that's what his supporters love about him even when they don't agree with what he says, that's kind if yuuge.
    
    Will his followers still love him if he does start walking things back and sounding like like all the "weak" "low energy" pols he makes fun of?
    
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4. notaskinnycook says:
  
  March 31, 2016 at 10:44 pm
  
  He puts his foot so far into his mouth he has athlete's stomach.
  
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5. Jorgensen says:
  
  April 1, 2016 at 1:18 am
  
  So you would support Trump over Cruz, who just hosted a women's adoration fest in Wisconsin. Both candidates are anti-choice, but Trump crossed the line and said he'd support criminal penalties for women who sought an abortion. Trump realized within a day that was politically incorrect and tried to abort his comment… and rebirth his position to say women would not be penalized because they are victims. In Trump's world, I think all women are victims or soon will be if he wins election.
  
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Gray in Mountains says:

March 31, 2016 at 5:21 pm

I wonder how Donald would have responded if a more clever interviewer had asked "Should the man pay for the abortion?", " Should a man pay a woman's expenses and for her troubles and inconvenience. "

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