Tulsi Gabbard Flip Flops on $15 Minimum Wage, Pretends to Have Been Leading on the Issue All Along

Just as we predicted yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard has abandoned her support for raising the minimum wage to just $12 an hour. On the same day our post was published, she joined Bernie Sanders and House and Senate Democratic leaders to announce the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 which is modeled on the Pay Workers a Living Wage Act introduced by Congressman and Progressive Caucus Chair Keith Ellison in 2015 — a bill that she declined to co-sponsor.

Is it a good thing that Gabbard reversed herself and now supports a genuinely progressive position ($15 an hour minimum wage) as opposed to a Clintonian compromise ($12 an hour)?

Yes, unquestionably.

Is it bad for political leaders to change their minds about an issue?

Of course not.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that Gabbard never acknowledges that this is a new position or that she changed her mind about anything. Even worse, her office issued a misleading press release concealing her legislative history on the minimum wage:

“Background: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has supported legislation to raise the federal minimum wage throughout her time in Congress, and is an original cosponsor of the legislation introduced today to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She has also cosponsored legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R.1869) to address wage discrimination across the United States.”

From Gabbard’s press release, readers would never guess that she co-sponsored $12 an hour minimum wage legislation in 2015 instead of Ellison’s $15 an hour bill that was introduced as part of Sanders’ presidential campaign. This is the same kind of deception she engaged in on the Trump-Russia investigation where she falsely claimed to have “long” favored the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ongoing criminal investigation of the president, his family, and campaign staff.

Changing one’s mind and taking a better position is one thing, but pretending your brand new position was really your position all along is the kind of crap that destroyed Hillary Clinton’s path to the presidency. Tulsi Gabbard’s clumsy flip flops and feeble attempts to obscure the bombshells hidden in her political history will fare no better in the long run.