Longtime House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill once declared, “All politics is local.”
So it should come as no surprise that the loudest opponents to the bailout plan for the Big Three automakers were Republican senators whose states are home to factories run by Detroit’s foreign competitors.
Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, for instance, took a particularly harsh tone with auto executives, suggesting their restructuring bids “are not a serious set of plans.”
Since the 1990s, Alabama has won three assembly plants, from Honda, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai, and an engine plant by Toyota.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who slammed the bailout plan Thursday, has a Toyota plant in Georgetown.
And Bob Corker of Tennessee, who played a starring role in efforts to broker a last-minute Senate compromise Thursday, has the American headquarters of Japan’s Nissan, several Nissan plants and a planned factory by Volkswagon in his state.
But Corker’s compromise effort collapsed after the United Auto Workers refused to accept Corker’s insistence of wage and benefit concessions in 2009 to create parity with workers at U.S. factories owned by Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai and other foreign companies.
“We offered any date in the year 2009 - any date - any date, just when will we actually get there,” Corker said on the Senate floor after his proposed deal collapsed.
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger cast the wage issue as a calculated attack on organized labor.
“The GOP caucus was insistent the restructuring be done on the backs of our workers and retirees,” Gettelfinger said in a hastily arranged news conference Friday morning. “Other stakeholders were not being held to the same standard organized labor was.”
The union, which had already accepted a series of cuts in its current contract, sought to push any more concessions back to 2011, when its contracts with auto companies expire.
The fact that Republican senators from Southern states have thousands of constituents employed by foreign car manufacturers outweighed the significance of the hefty campaign contributions they have receive from the Big three automakers.
“A part of this is certainly the old adage ‘Where you stand is where you sit,’ ” Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, told the Los Angeles Times.
Yet the foreign carmakers were notably silent throughout the current debate, apparently loath to bring attention to themselves.
Republican opposition to labor unions also seemed to be a pivotal factor in the bailout calculus. For years, Southern lawmakers offered lucrative tax subsidy packages to foreign automotive companies in return for building facilities in the region and hiring local workers. The South’s lower wages and weaker support for unions were also a draw.
The irony is that the Big Three companies have steered 61% of their campaign contributions to Republicans since 2000, or $7.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Democrats, meanwhile, have looked to the United Auto Workers for support. Since 2000, the union has given $12.5 million to Democrats compared with only $94,540 to Republicans.
Senators who supported the UAW position in Thursday’s talks received nearly 14 times as much money, on average, from the union in the last 20 years, than those who voted against it, the Center for Responsive Politics found.
GM downplayed the role that money may have played in the current debate.
“It’s highly doubtful that political giving ever played a factor in an individual member’s position,” GM spokesman Greg Martin told the Los Angeles Times.
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