The LillyLedbetter Act has been at the top of Obama's 'most ardent supporters' lists of his "accomplishments". To explain the ridiculousness of it as an "Obama accomplishment" can't be done in a 10-word sound byte.
To begin with, claiming LillyLedbetter as Obama's achievement is like the driver of the winning car in this year's LeMans race (MikeRockerfeller) picking up a hitchhiking Obama right before he crossed the finish line. It's even more deceitful than that, for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke. But even that doesn't quite explain it.
Obama & Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:
By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislation, the problem the legislation is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislation would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressional efforts. Or, something else.
With LillyLedbetter, it took 45 years to have the legislature address a problem (statute of limitations for filing equal pay discrimination lawsuits in the CivilRightsAct of 1964) in what never should have been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964.
LillyLedbetter really had nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimination". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For presenting an equal-pay lawsuit. And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half.
It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress, because it would have meant more money paid out from corporations to women, and Democrats work for corporations just as Republicans do.
If you want to tout passage of Lilly Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediately with legislation for transparency in pay. It's a joke without it. It would be like taking a starving person to a world class restaurant, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in his face, but not letting him eat.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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