The Senate Republicans Who Voted for Paid Leave Aren’t Exactly Pro-Labor

Rubio and Hawley have made the most effort to lure working-class votes by promising something more than the usual culture-war demagoguery. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann identified Rubio as the favored 2024 presidential candidate of a group Lemann called “the Reversalists,” who question market fundamentalism and purport to attack Democrats on economic issues from the left. Hawley positions himself as a trustbuster, mainly out of Trumpian animosity against Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

But give me a break: Rubio’s lifetime AFL-CIO score is 11 percent, eight percentage points below the Senate Republican average, and last year it dropped to 9 percent. Hawley’s lifetime score is also 11 percent, and last year it dropped to 4 percent. Cruz’s lifetime score is 9 percent and last year dropped to 4 percent. The others’ lifetime scores are 14 percent (Kennedy), 15 percent (Braun), and 22 percent (Graham). The only member of the de facto Senate Republican labor caucus who supports labor more frequently than the average Senate Republican is Graham, and Graham still opposes labor 78 percent of the time.

The most important labor bill before Congress is the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO, Act, which would remove various obstacles to union organizing, many of which date back to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The Republican minority on the House Education and Labor Committee (who, if past practice is observed, will change the committee’s title to the “House Education and the Workforce Committee” when they assume the majority, because the very word “labor” offends them) have called the PRO Act a “radical union boss wish list.” Nobody in the makeshift new Senate Republican labor caucus dissents publicly from this view, and Rubio has introduced a lame “teamwork” bill intended to derail the PRO Act. Five congressional Republicans support the PRO Act, but they’re all in the House. Even Susan Collins is afraid to support it.