AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is not liking the shape of Monday's congressional deal-making.
Sam Stein
reports:
"We are very concerned about a situation which seems like we have a couple hundred billion of dollars of concessions made on one hand—some of which will be permanent—and on the other hand, we are going into a further and further round of fake fiscal crisis—the debt ceiling, the sequester—in which we are going to hear, of course, from the same fiscal hypocrites that we have to cut this and that," the official said. "We just gave away $300 to $400 billion [by giving in on the tax rate threshold]. If we had an actual fiscal crisis, that would be the first place to look for the money."
The official said that the AFL-CIO wasn't formally urging lawmakers to oppose the deal—at least not until more details about the bill were known.
"We are throwing cold water on the kind of drift that we felt this afternoon," the official explained. "This really troubles us."
For context, full-blown formal AFL-CIO opposition to a deal would require input from the labor federation's executive council. Trumka's tweets may offer the direction that input might be likely to go, based on the principles the AFL-CIO has pushed for throughout, and we can hope that some additional congressional Democrats will take the cue and stand against a bad deal.