Politics & Power Quote by Mike Honda

Forty-two years is doing a lot of work here: it turns a policy milestone into an accusation. Mike Honda isn’t marveling at history so much as indicting the present. By anchoring the claim to Kennedy and the Equal Pay Act, he invokes a civic origin story - the moment America supposedly decided the problem was solved. Then he drops the punchline: it wasn’t. The “amazing” is strategically plainspoken, a politician’s way of expressing moral disbelief without sounding abstract or technocratic.

The intent is pressure. Honda frames wage inequality not as a complicated economic puzzle but as a breach of a contract already signed. That matters because it shifts the debate from “Should we do something?” to “Why haven’t we enforced what we already agreed was right?” The subtext is institutional failure: if the law exists and the disparity persists, then the issue isn’t awareness; it’s power, loopholes, weak enforcement, and a culture that tolerates evasions like job-title games, opaque pay scales, and retaliation against workers who compare salaries.

Contextually, this is the language of early-2000s equality politics, when “same work” was a deliberate simplification aimed at mainstream legitimacy. It sidesteps the thornier realities - occupational segregation, caregiving penalties, race and class gaps - to make a clean moral claim that travels well in hearings, press clips, and constituent mail. The quote works because it weaponizes time: decades of delay become evidence, not an excuse, and patience reads as complicity.