BOB HERBERT: Deceit Beyond Bounds

It sure looks like American voters want change. And here’s an example of the kind of thing they want a change from.

In a move that was typically and patently deceitful, Republicans in Congress tried to pass a minimum wage measure last week in which the biggest winners would have been some of the wealthiest people in America.

The G.O.P. has tended to fight minimum wage hikes the way the Hatfields battled the McCoys. But suddenly this summer, Republicans discovered minimum wage legislation that they could truly love. G.O.P. leaders in Congress linked a modest increase in the minimum wage to a whopping decrease in the estate tax. The cut in the estate tax would have cost the government at least $268 billion in revenue over the next decade, and probably a lot more.

In exchange for this estate tax bonanza for the fabulously wealthy, the G.O.P. was willing to approve a $2.10-an-hour increase, stretched over three years, in the miserly $5.15-an-hour minimum wage. It was made clear that any Democrats who dared oppose this raid on the Treasury would be targeted by Republicans as obstructionists blocking a sorely needed wage hike for the lowest-paid workers in the nation.

I’m for an increase in the minimum wage and against a cut in the estate tax. But that’s not the point here. The point is the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to engage in deceit to try and achieve ends it could not achieve any other way. The latest incarnation of the Republican Party has taken deceit in government and politics to dangerous new extremes, and it’s time to call a halt to it.

The war in Iraq will be remembered as one of the greatest exercises in systematic governmental deceit in U.S. history. But the Iraq fiasco is just the most stunning and tragic example of a style of governing and politicking that has become second nature to the Bush administration and much of the national Republican establishment.

This is a crowd that will tell you with a straight face that it is creating a wondrous new world in the Middle East, that it is doing what it can to stem the ominous tide of global warming, that the United States does not engage in torture, that the administration carefully guards the civil liberties of ordinary Americans, and that it does not favor the wealthy over poor and working people.

These are folks who will tell you that up is down, and punish you for insisting that up is up.

It is in that same deceitful and vengeful spirit that the party is now attacking Democratic senators who managed to hold fast, under the leadership of the minority leader, Harry Reid, to defeat the legislation that cynically tied the estate tax windfall to an increase in the minimum wage.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declared that Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington who voted against the bogus bill, “decided that giving in to pressure from her party’s leadership was more important than voting to raise the federal minimum wage.”

Senator Cantwell, who is up for re-election this year, favors an increase in the minimum wage, as does her party’s leadership. It has been the Democratic Party that has been pushing for years for an increase in the minimum wage, but there is no room for that reality in the G.O.P.’s corrosive culture of deceit.

The buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. Members of Congress have raised their own pay by $31,600 since the last increase in the minimum wage nine years ago. For Republicans to exploit the plight of workers buried in economic hardship in order to put millions of additional dollars into the portfolios of the already wealthy is beyond egregious.

“If you landed here from Mars and looked at Congress’s agenda,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, “you’d think that the problem in America is that rich people don’t have enough money.”

If the Republicans wanted to increase the minimum wage, they could do it in about the time it takes to snap your finger. Democrats would be on board, and the legislative language would not have to be much longer than a paragraph.

They don’t want a minimum wage increase; they want a cut in the estate tax.

Regrettably, there is always a certain amount of deceit in politics. Republicans do not have a monopoly on it. But for a system like ours to work even reasonably well, governmental deceit has to be held within certain limits. Otherwise the system will break down.

Today’s Republican Party has gone far beyond those limits.