Double Standard

  Double Standard by Newt Gingrich

Originally published at the Washington Times

Last fall, Hillary Clinton took a question from a young girl at one of her rallies, who just happened to be sitting in a reserved seat in the front row. Spontaneously, the girl asked Hillary about one of her signature issues. “Do you think when you are president,” she asked, “you’ll be paid as much as if you were male?”

Clinton’s beaming response, captured from multiple camera angles, later became a television ad in which she promised to “do everything [she] can do make sure every woman in every job gets paid the same as the men.”
The display reflected how central Clinton has made the issue of pay equity to her campaign, in which she is attempting to portray Republicans as somehow opposed to equality for women.

In fact, demanding “equal pay” laws (which are supposedly intended to ban discrimination that is already illegal) is a longtime theme for Clinton. In 2014, she tweeted “20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do. #EqualPay #NoCeilings”.

During her time in the Senate, Clinton spoke about the issue frequently, even though, by the standards of measurement she wants to apply to others, she paid women just 72 cents on the dollar compared to men. That is to say, if you add up every dollar her office paid to women and every dollar paid to men, without regard to career experience, job responsibility, or life circumstances, she paid women only 72 percent of what she paid her male staffers on average.

This week, the Daily Caller revealed that Clinton’s own habit of perpetuating pay injustice wasn’t limited to her Senate office. It extended to the highest levels of the mammoth foundation under her family’s control, the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The Daily Caller analysis found that out of 11 senior executives at the Clinton Foundation--eight men compared to just three women--all of the men made more than $200,000, while only one woman earned that amount.

The Foundation’s executive director, Stephanie Streett, made $169,000, while the two other female executives made $183,000 and $201,000.

Compare that to the male executives, such as Frederic Poust, Director of Sponsors and Marketing, who made $484,000, or Chairman Bruce Lindsey, who made $394,000.

In all the women senior executives at the Clinton Foundation made just 38 percent on average of what the Clintons paid male senior executives.

That number, 38 percent, should stick with Clinton throughout the campaign. Every voter should be reminded of it every time Hillary accuses Republicans of defending “discrimination”. If she wants to make pay equity a central issue of her campaign, she owes Americans an explanation of why there was such a disparity in the pay of senior executives at her own foundation.

After all, how can Hillary promise to “do everything she can” to impose her crude standards of equal pay on American businesses on when she doesn’t even apply them to women she personally employs?

If the past is any guide, she’ll do it the same way she runs against the influence of Wall Street billionaires while aggressively soliciting their money, the same way she touts her national security expertise after exposing our secrets to foreign governments through her private server, and the same way she advocates for stricter gun control while she personally has been protected by armed guards since 1983.

With stunning hypocrisy.