Arkansas Attorney General, Who Got a 77% Raise, Brags Federal Judge Just Blocked Overtime Rule for 4.2 Million Workers

State Attorney General Makes $130,000 Annually – Arkansas Ranks Sixth in Poverty

A federal judge has just blocked the Obama administration’s new rule regulating overtime pay, which was about to increase the wages of 4.2 million lower-income workers. On Tuesday evening U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman, Texas, ruled the regulation is unlawful.

Representatives from twenty-one states, including the attorney general of Arkansas, joined together with “a coalition of business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” in a lawsuit against the federal government, Reuters reports. The new regulations were to go into effect next week, on December 1.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge immediately took to Twitter to brag that the judge granted her request.

Rutledge, 40, was elected in 2014 and took office in January of 2015, earning a salary of $73,132. In March of that year, Rutledge and other top elected officials, including the governor, received exorbitant salary increases. Her salary was increased to $130,000, a 77.7% increase.

Reuters notes that the Obama administration’s new “rule would have doubled to $47,500 the maximum salary a worker can earn and still be eligible for mandatory overtime pay.”

In other words, the new rule would have benefitted greatly lower-income workers. A 2014 study shows Arkansas has the sixth highest poverty rate, with nearly one in five residents living in poverty.

The judge’s ruling comes just three days before the official start of the holiday shopping season, Black Friday.

Rutledge, who has strongly supported former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential aspirations, is no stranger to controversy.

Earlier this year Rutledge appealed an Arkansas judge’s ruling that upheld the  City of Fayetteville’s LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance. Last month Rutledge asked the Arkansas State Supreme Court court to strike down Fayetteville’s anti-discrimination ordinance.

An Arkansas Times article in 2014 offered seven reasons why it deemed Rutledge “not fit” to be the state’s AG. 

 

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