On Tuesday night, Democrats showcased Lilly Ledbetter as she attacked the Republican Party in general and GOP presidential nominee as out-of-touch with women and not committed to closing the so-called gender wage gap. It seems the partisan Ledbetter ignored or is blissfully unaware that female Democratic senators are egregious offenders when it comes to equal pay for their office staff. Will the liberal media do the fact-checking or the context-providing that needs to be done in reaction to the Ledbetter speech?
Ledbetter said in her address to the Democratic Convention on September 4:
President Obama [was] on our side…the first bill that President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. I think it says something about his priorities that the first bill he would put his name on has my name on it too.... that was the first step but it can’t be the last. Because women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar men make. Those pennies add up to real money…maybe 23 cents doesn't sound like a lot to someone with a Swiss bank account, a Cayman Island Investments – an IRA worth tens of millions of dollars. But Governor Romney, when we lose 23 cents every hour, every day, every paycheck, every job, over our entire lives, what we lose can't just be measured in dollars.
Three years ago, the house passed the Paycheck Fairness Act to level the playing field for women in America. The Senate Republicans blocked it. Mitt Romney won't even say if he supports it. President Obama does. In the end, I didn't get a dime of the money – I was shortchanged.
As Andrew Stiles of The Washington Free Beacon reported on May 24, "of the five senators who participated in Wednesday’s press conference—Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.), Patty Murray (D., Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.)—three pay their female staff members significantly less than male staffers."
How much less?
Well, "Murray, who has repeatedly accused Republicans of waging a 'war a women,' is one of the worst offenders. Female members of Murray’s staff made about $21,000 less per year than male staffers in 2011, a difference of 33.8 percent...A significant 'gender gap' exists in Feinstein’s office, where women also made about $21,000 less than men in 2011, but the percentage difference—41 percent—was even higher than Murray’s. Boxer’s female staffers made about $5,000 less, a difference of 7.3 percent."
When the bill was blocked, Boxer released a statement saying "Senate Republicans let down the women of America – and their families – by refusing to stand up for the basic principle of equal pay for equal work. But just as we didn’t quit when Republicans tried to defeat the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, we are not going to stop fighting until the Paycheck Fairness Act becomes the law of the land.”
The hypocrisy is palpable. Ms. Ledbetter doesn't know she is being "shortchanged" by the very people she vociferously supports in her fight for equal pay. However, since this hurts the president's narrative – and that of the Democratic Party – I doubt it will get much attention by the mainstream media.
