A Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing

By Lee Harrison, Chairman, Berkshire Brigades

Still hiding behind a barn jacket and a big smile, Senator Scott Brown is hoping you don’t notice whom he really represents.  Hint:  If you are part of the Bay State’s Middle Class, it’s not you!

Twice within a span of 10 days in October – and again this past week – Tea Party Republican Scott Brown voted against President Obama’s American Jobs Act.  His first “No” vote came a week after he gave a speech on the floor of the Senate, saying Americans “deserve better than Congressional gridlock.”  Presumably, he said this with a straight face.  The second came on Oct. 20, after Senate Democrats narrowed the bill to provide $35 billion to state and local governments to prevent layoffs of teachers, police, and firefighters.  To offset the cost, all three bills included a surtax on incomes over $1 million.  Didn’t matter.  No sharing of the burden for Scott Brown.  When push comes to shove, he votes for Wall St. over Main St. every time.  Protecting that elite group is always more important to our Senator Brown than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped to create.

Oh, Scott is no fan of the environment, either.  Right after he voted against jobs last week, he voted for a Republican bill that would prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

This, of course, is typical Scott Brown behavior:  He pretends to be an independent voice right up until Kentucky GOP Senator Mitch McConnell tells him how to vote.  But his votes against President Obama’s fully-paid-for American Jobs Act are as revealing as they are inexcusable.  This is neither the behavior of a strong, independent-minded leader, as he would have Bay Staters believe, nor a defender of the Middle Class.  Massachusetts needs and deserves both, as we had for 47 years in the person of the late Ted Kennedy.  Rather, it brings to mind Winston Churchill’s famous description of another Prime Minister, whom he dubbed a “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” or in this case Churchill might have said, “a barn jacket.”

While Scott Brown’s votes surely played well among his Kentucky mentors, McConnell and Rand Paul, it was a direct attack on hard-pressed middle-class Massachusetts families.  Obama’s jobs bill would have kept Massachusetts teachers in the classroom, Massachusetts police and firefighters on the job, and put construction workers back to work rebuilding our state’s crumbling schools, bridges, and roads.  Here’s a look at what Scott Brown’s “No” votes helped to kill:

• A 50% payroll tax cuts for workers next year, or about $1,830 for a typical Massachusetts household with a median income of around $59,000
• An immediate investment of at least $850,700,000 in Massachusetts highway and transit modernization projects, supporting a minimum of 11,100 local jobs
• Nearly $600 million to help Massachusetts support up to 6,300 educator and first responder jobs
• $400 million to modernize public schools that would have created 4,900 jobs
• $40,400,000 to put construction workers on the job rehabilitating and refurbishing vacant and foreclosed homes and businesses
• $68,800,000 to modernize facilities at Massachusetts community colleges
• Sweeping unemployment insurance reforms that could help put the 123,000 long-term unemployed workers in Massachusetts back to work
• Unemployment insurance extensions that would have kept benefits flowing to 49,300 people
• A Pathways Back to Work Fund to help place 2,500 adults and 9,200 youths in jobs in Massachusetts.

Unlike Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whom he has repeatedly attacked, Scott Brown seems to think the wealthy shouldn’t have to pay their fair share, even though the top 1% are taking in more of the nation’s income than at any other time since the Roaring ‘20s.

As economist Paul Krugman points out:  “The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.”

Ms. Warren’s YouTube video, in which she made an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich, made Scott Brown and his wealthy friends apoplectic.  “Nothing about what she said was radical,” adds Krugman.  “It was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that ‘Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.’”

Yet, by the vehemence of Scott Brown’s response, it’s clear Ms. Warren hit a nerve.  Here, too, Churchill had insight:  “You have enemies?  Good.  That means you’ve stood up for something.”  And Elizabeth Warren certainly has.

###