Campaign veterans run anti-Wal-Mart effort

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Governor vetoes bill on health insurance
Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican who is running for re-election next year, vetoed the measure, saying it jeopardized Wal-Mart's plans to build a distribution center in Somerset County, Md., that would provide up to 750 jobs at an average of $12 an hour, $2.50 more than the county's current average wage.

The law, Ehrlich said, is “bad policy because it imposes an arbitrary number on employers and health care and further establishes that a state will dictate to businesses the type and level of health insurance they must provide for their employees.”

Blank predicted that Ehrlich would "pay a political price for standing with Wal-Mart.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. has been touting his bill to require states to identify which companies with 50 or more employees have workers receiving Medicaid or other taxpayer-funded health insurance. The bill would also require states to estimate the cost to taxpayers of providing health insurance to employees of large firms who are enrolled in Medicaid.

“Every American worker across this country is contributing a part of their taxes to pay for health care for those families in need who work at Wal- Mart,” Kennedy said at a recent Capitol Hill rally . “And at the same time we see record profits, which they (Wal-Mart executives) are distributing to themselves and to their shareholders.”

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The bill’s purpose, according to its House sponsor, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., is to “find out how much that dollar that we’re saving on a pair of jeans is costing us in other ways.”

Kennedy said his bill “is the first step, but it certainly will not be the last,” hinting at a federal law along the lines of the Maryland legislation that Ehrlich vetoed.

Arguing that Wal-Mart’s low wages undercut its competitors, whose workers are represented by labor unions, Sen. Jon Corzine, D- N.J. said, “Our friends who work in the labor movement struggle every day in collective bargaining to try to provide health care to their workers… It is absolutely essential that we level the playing field, that we make sure that workers are treated equally everywhere.”

Contributor to Clinton, Bayh campaigns
If one believes that campaign contributions give a donor political clout, then Kennedy, Corzine, and Weiner face an uphill battle in Congress.

The Wal-Mart political action committee, which ranked 20^th among all PACs in the amount of its donations in the 2004 campaign, gave 78 percent of its contributions to Republican candidates and 22 percent to Democrats.

Among the prominent Democrats receiving Wal-Mart PAC money for the 2004 and 2006 campaigns are Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, and House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland. In the early 1990s, while living in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board of directors.

If the Wal-Mart issue grows in prominence, then Clinton and Bayh, potential contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, may find themselves facing tough questioning from anti-Wal-Mart activists on the campaign trail.

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