The Fair Labor Standards Act is the law that says you have to be paid minimum wage, and overtime if you're eligible for it.

Guess what law House Republicans held a hearing complaining about on Thursday?

The chairman of the Workforce Protections Subcommittee, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), said that the Fair Labor Standards Act’s protections “stand in the way of progress.”

J. Randall MacDonald, the senior vice president of human resources for IBM was starker. MacDonald called these protections “a job killer” and gives “U.S. employers another reason to invest elsewhere.”

As you can see in Dennis Kucinich's sharp questioning of the witnesses, the deck was stacked: three of the witnesses refused to give a direct answer on whether they thought the minimum wage should be higher, lower, or the same. Those would be the three witnesses called by Republicans to argue that the Fair Labor Standards Act is a threat to the economy. Like this gem of a human being:

Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson notes that Walberg "proffered no prescription for reform." But that's not to say they don't have goals:

Aaron Albright, a spokesman for Democratic committee members, said Republicans are essentially trying to "roll back" the statute so that fewer workers can receive overtime pay. "What's the purpose for the tinkering? It's basically to reclassify workers so that they're not eligible for overtime or minimum wage," Albright told HuffPost. "The proposition is workers are making too much money, and that's probably a surprise to workers who haven’t seen a raise in quite a while. This is about large corporations increasing their bottom lines."

This hearing seems to have been intended to set the stage, so that when Republicans are ready to go fully on the offensive against minimum wage and overtime protections, they have a record to point to of so-called experts testifying seriously before Congress about the dire effects of the Fair Labor Standards Act. That's today's Republicans: Just smart enough to know that tearing the floor out from under America's workers will take some prep work, but extremist enough to make the effort.