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Josh Hawley

CPAC Speakers: GOP 'Civil War' Won by Trump

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The speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) believe former President Donald Trump is the leader of the conservative movement.

The media, though, has written about the Republican Party and the “deep divisions over the extent to which it should embrace Trump after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress.” A headline in the Los Angeles Times reads, “The GOP’s civil war is just beginning, and the fighting will get worse before it gets better.”

But the attendees at CPAC disagree. Nearly every noteworthy speaker has supported Trump’s presidency or outright praised his “American First” agenda.

“Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere,” said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Sen. Josh Hawley drew among the loudest applause and a standing ovation when he spoke about challenging the election certification on January sixth. “I thought it was an important stand to take,” he said.

“We cannot — we will not — go back to the days of the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who outlined a new Trumpian GOP agenda focused on immigration policies, opposition to China, and ending endless wars.

“We will not win the future by trying to go back to where the Republican Party used to be,” echoed Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the fundraising committee tasked with electing Republicans to the Senate. “If we do, we will lose the working base that President Trump so animated. We’re going to lose elections across the country, and ultimately we’re going to lose our nation.”

Former Secretary Mike Pompeo said, “I’m proud of our fight. And I’m proud of our accomplishments. We have truly upended the status quo,” Pompeo declared to a standing ovation.

Trump Jr., who labeled the conference “TPAC” in honor of his father, hyped the return of his father and the “Make America Great Again” platform to the spotlight.

“I imagine it will not be what we call a ‘low-energy’ speech,” he said. “And I assure you that it will solidify Donald Trump and all of your feelings about the MAGA movement as the future of the Republican Party.”

And as the program was wrapping up for the day on Friday, Trump issued a statement endorsing Max Miller, a former staffer who has now launched a campaign challenging Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), another Republican who voted in favor of impeachment.

In a statement, Trump vowed to recruit insurgent candidates “who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America first.

Trump seems focused on the movement he began, lording the America First agenda into battle against the “business as usual” crowd in Washington, DC. With $31 million on hand, bankrolled by his leadership PAC, Save America, Trump’s coffers will strategically be invested.

Josh Hawley Plan Would Require $15 Wage for Employees of Billion-Dollar Corporations

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A plan introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) would increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour for Americans employed by billion-dollar corporations.

Hawley’s legislation would require corporations with revenues of $1 billion or more to pay their employees at least $15 an hour, a wage increase that would likely boost salaries for millions of Americans while protecting small businesses. Hawley said on Friday:

In this moment of crisis, our country needs us to stand up and say, ‘We will not be ruled by giant corporations and liberal elite.’ We will not be told what to do by these modern-day oligarchs. What we need is a new nationalism, a new agenda to make the rule of the people real in this country and give the people American back, give it back to them.

The minimum wage has not been raised in any way since 2009, when the cost of living was 20 percent lower.

In addition, Hawley has introduced separate legislation known as the Blue Collar Bonus which would give bonuses to every small business employee currently earning below the median wage via an automatic tax credit based on the number of hours worked.

Hawley says the legislation would boost per hour wages to make them 50 percent closer to the median wage.

For example, a small business employee making $12 an hour would be eligible for a $2.25 per hour credit under the Hawley plan. Over the course of a year, the employee would be able to get a total credit of $4,680 in the form of four payments of $1,170 from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey finds that nearly 6-in-10 Americans support increasing the minimum wage. Only about 34 percent of Americans oppose increasing the minimum wage. About 40 percent of those surveyed said they would benefit from a wage increase.

Wages for working and middle class Americans have been exceptionally stagnant and low for decades — largely due to the United States’ free trade policies and mass immigration that has depleted communities’ economic wealth.

A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have grown by only about 22 percent. Compare that to the wage growth of the top 0.01 percent. The nation’s billionaire class saw their earnings increase more than 343 percent over that same period — more than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter here. 

Josh Hawley: 'Our Rights Come from God, Not Google'

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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) railed against the “radical liberals” and the “largest corporations” of the world, proclaiming, “Our rights come from God and not Google.”

“That’s been the fight of human history,” Hawley said.

Hawley also touched on his objection to the certification of electoral votes and was given a standing ovation, adding that “corporations are telling people what to do; that’s the oligarchy and liberal elites” of Washington D.C. who are trying to “enforce their will” on America.

Hawley then demanded, “Break up these large corporations, for the good of the people, break them up!”

Hawley joins Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who last year advocated for Google to be broken up for what he called an abuse of “monopoly power.”

Google, the world’s most powerful technology company, actively interfered in the 2020 election by burying links to Breitbart News in its search results. Breitbart News published data showing that Breitbart’s Google search visibility was down 99 percent compared to the same period in 2016.

Hawley concluded, “But that’s the fight of our time – to make the rule of the people an actual thing again – to restore the sovereignty of the American people… That’s the fight of liberty. That’s the fight of human history.”

With the $15 Minimum Wage Dead, What Next?

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(pgaborphotos/Getty Images)

The Left is in the throes of a temper tantrum over the fact that a $15 minimum wage can’t be included in the COVID bill. As I explain on the homepage today, though, the Senate parliamentarian made the right decision here: A minimum-wage hike is not primarily a budget policy, and therefore is not eligible for the filibuster-proof “budget reconciliation” process.

And as I also explain, telling Democrats they’re restricted to things that affect the budget — such as shoveling taxpayer money out the door — is not that big a limitation. Indeed, Democratic senators have already said they’re exploring alternatives to a minimum-wage hike that would probably qualify, such as taking tax benefits away from businesses that pay workers less than $15 an hour.

Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Mitt Romney might have an opening here; they’ve offered their own plans for boosting wages, and they might be able to fashion something that could either qualify for reconciliation or gain enough Republican support to beat a filibuster of a separate bill.

Josh Hawley’s Wage Proposal

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Axios has the details. Basically, for the next three years, workers making less than $16.50 an hour (rising with inflation) would receive a refundable tax credit worth one-half of the difference between their hourly wages and that number, up to 40 hours per week. So someone making $10 an hour would get a credit worth $3.25 an hour.

In my writing on the minimum wage, I’ve often made the point that if we want workers to be paid more, we should do that with taxpayer dollars — not by killing jobs, interfering with the contracts between workers and their employers, and driving up prices for customers as well. Hawley’s idea is one way of doing this.

There are some legitimate concerns about the plan too, though:

  • Hawley says this will cost $200 billion. That’s not a necessarily a deal-breaker for trying out a temporary program — it’s about $600 for every person in the country, and maybe 5 percent of the typical pre-COVID annual federal budget — but if this becomes permanent it will need to be paid for.
  • The credit would be sent out once per quarter, basically a windfall for low-wage workers every three months. I’d prefer injecting the money into workers’ paychecks or paying it once a month, which would make for smoother household budgeting.
  • Because the credit is worth half of the difference between $16.50 and the worker’s wage, a worker who gets a $1-an-hour raise will lose 50 cents an hour from the tax credit. That’s a very high marginal tax rate, and these workers will often lose other government benefits as well when they’re paid more.
  • Employers could cut wages to capture part of the credit. More people will be willing to take a job at any given wage if the government is going to chip in extra; this means the supply of labor goes up and the price (i.e., the wage) goes down.

You could address many of these problems by requiring employers to pay more and then giving them, rather than the workers, a tax credit worth some percentage of the rise in pay. For those who want to dive into the weeds, it’s interesting to compare the Hawley proposal with David Neumark’s Higher Wages Tax Credit.