President Obama, campaigning in Iowa yesterday, boasted about signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, and noted that Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he supports the law or not. "What's so hard about weighing in on that?" he asked.
Campaigning in Ohio today, President Bill Clinton was thinking along the same lines. "Would you have signed the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay law?" Clinton said. "No answer. He can't even say whether he'd sign a law that's already on the books."
At this point, we've waited for six months for Romney to take a position on a straightforward law that passed Congress with bipartisan support. Romney has said he wouldn't repeal it, but he won't say whether he supports it. Ed Gillespie on Tuesday said Romney would have rejected the bill if he were president, then said the opposite yesterday, without actually stating a simple opinion. As of this morning, we still don't know what the candidate believes.
If we're looking for hints, we can at least look to Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, who voted against the law and still seems to oppose it.
"Lilly Ledbetter was not an equal pay law. It was about opening up the lawsuits and statute of limitations," Ryan said. "It wasn't an equal pay law, and of course, we support equal pay," he said.
The Romney campaign did not answer questions about Romney's position on the issue in 2009 or about apparent discrepancies among the campaign on that question.
This is not an uncommon sentiment on the right .Pete Hoekstra, the Republicans' U.S. Senate hopeful in Michigan, called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay law "a nuisance." A Romney surrogate in New Hampshire said the law is little more than "a handout to trial lawyers." Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) agrees.
And if Romney is thinking along the same lines, there can at least be a debate about whether women should have legal options if their employers engage in wage discrimination. But in another display of weakness, Romney simply lacks the courage to take a stand.