I forget where I saw this link, but the Business Insider’s story is entitled Wisconsin Republican: Women Are Paid Less Because ‘Money Is More Important For Men’, and it’s about how the state of Wisconsin no longer has an equal pay law.
According to the Business Insider, this is Scott Walker’s doing:
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker opened up a new front in the GOP’s war against women last week when he overturned his state’s equal pay law, which made it easier for workers to sue their employers for wage discrimination.
Business Insider links to its earlier piece, entitled The Governor Of Wisconsin May Have Just Blown The Election For Mitt Romney, which puts the repeal on the governor of Wisconsin again:
The Democrats “GOP War On Women” rallying cry got a major lift from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker today, with the news that the Republican darling repealed a Wisconsin law that made it easier for women to fight wage discrimination.
The Huffington Post reports that Walker quietly overturned Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act last night, bowing to pressure from the state’s Republican lawmakers. The equal pay law was designed to deter wage discrimination by making it easier for workers to press charges against their employers.
Got that? Walker overturned the law, and Walker quietly overturned the law. How did he do this? Fiat? Diktat? Executive order? We have to go to the Huffington Post story linked in the second story to learn how Walker acted unilaterally:
A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Wait a minute: The executive branch of government did not act unilaterally, but merely signed a bill passed by both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature? That is, the elected representatives of Wisconsin debated and passed a bill, Scott Walker unilaterally declared war on Women by performing his duty and signing it?
Although the body of the article gets it right, the Huffington Post still pins it on Scott Walker in the headline, “Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law”.
I realize that, with a Federal executive who ignores the legislature and the courts, that is, the co-equal branches of government, the whole Constitutional civics thing gets purposefully murky.
But can’t “journalists” bother to know the difference between signing a bill and an executive acting like a lone wolf? Or would that threaten the new order, where executives are more than figureheads and have sweeping powers that they should only use for good, or what passes for good in Democrat minds?
