Women’s wage gap not part of Democrat’s election-year strategy: DeLauro

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat, said Tuesday that Democrats’ push to close the gender gap is not part of an election year strategy.

“I’ve been introducing the paycheck fairness act every Congress since 1997,” she said on MSNBC.

“This whole notion that we have created this construct about pay equity for women in preparation for November, we have been laboring long and hard, a number of us, for this issue because of the very fact that women are making 77 cents on average of what men earn.”

When asked why Democrats couldn’t get it done in 2009 and 2010, when they controlled both the House and Senate, she said it was still GOP obstructionism that prevented the bill from becoming law.

“When Leader Pelosi was Speaker Pelosi, in the House of Representatives, we passed the Paycheck Fairness Act, and I might add, we had 14 of our Republican colleagues who participated in that victory,” she said. “In the Senate, we needed two more votes on it. There were five Republican women at that time, we only needed two of them, and they said no.”