Standing With Main Street

These brave Republicans are crossing the party line to support working families

Wisconsin Sen. Dale Schultz (Photo by M.P. King/AP)

In this current political climate, where bipartisanship is nearly non-existent and too many politicians are aligning themselves with corporate interests to protect the 1 percent, several Republicans stand out for resisting right-wing idealogues and standing up for working Americans.

In Wisconsin, state Sen. Dale Schultz is a political moderate who has sided with working families on several key issues. Last year, Schultz was the lone Republican who voted against Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal stripping collective bargaining rights from public service workers. “Public employees are willing to make sacrifices on things like wages and benefits, but we need to preserve collective bargaining as a tool which has helped keep labor peace in this state for decades,” Schultz said.

Florida Sen. Mike Fasano (Photo courtesy flsenate.gov)

In New Hampshire, efforts by corporate interests and their politicical allies in the House to push through right-to-work-for-less legislation failed when 49 Republican members opposed the law’s passage.

Florida Sen. Dennis Jones (Photo courtesy flsenate.gov)

In Florida, state Sen. Mike Fasano incurred the ire of his party — which holds the majority in the Legislature — and joined 20 other legislators in rejecting the country’s largest prison privatization plan ever proposed in a 21 to 19 vote. Gov. Rick Scott and other supporters of the plan said it would save the state much-needed funds, but Fasano called it a “bailout” for private prison companies, said it put the public at risk and that it could kill jobs. Fasano was stripped of his chairmanship of the Senate criminal justice budget committee, but called it the right thing to do for the 3,800 state corrections officers. “There is no question that families will be affected. Communities will be affected. People will not have a job and the trickle-down effect will be enormous,” he said. Speaking to AFSCME’s International Executive Board in March, Fasano said, “Our role as elected officials should not be performed out of loyalty to party.”

Several other Florida Republican senators, including Charlie Dean and Steve Oelrich, both former sheriffs, also voted against the bill, saying “jailing for profit” was not “for the public good.” Sen. Dennis Jones told the daily Tallahassee Herald Tribune that state employees shouldn’t be attacked. “What is wrong with state employees? We should be taking care of them rather than kicking them under the bus.”