ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

An unlikely scene emerged at a Republican conference Thursday afternoon: a tea party congressman deplored corporate tax-dodging, and the conservative audience responded with cheers.

Freshman Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) spoke to the GOP crowd yesterday at the Western Republican Leadership Conference. Though the majority of his speech echoed standard Tea Party rhetoric, Labrador deviated from a discussion of Republican tax philosophy to condemn corporate tax cheats. Labrador said, “I believe that it is fundamentally unfair that companies like GE are making huge profits and not paying taxes.” The Republican audience applauded Labrador’s criticism:

LABRADOR: When people scream about Republicans being unwilling to raise taxes on the rich, they’re actually partly right. We don’t want to raise taxes on anyone. Not just the poor, not just the middle class, not just the rich. We don’t want to raise taxes on anyone. But we do believe that everyone should pay the taxes that are assessed to them and not find ways to avoid them through accounting tricks. I believe that it is fundamentally unfair that companies like GE are making huge profits and not paying taxes. (Applause)

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Thursday’s scene displayed just how fed up Americans of all ideologies are with corporate tax cheats. With polls showing more than three in five Americans supporting increasing taxes on corporations and millionaires (including two-thirds of Republicans), perhaps outcries like these — even among conservative audiences — will become more commonplace.

Labrador aside, most Republican politicians have dismissed or even encouraged corporate tax dodging. In the presidential race, Newt Gingrich told ThinkProgress we should “celebrate” corporate tax dodgers and let them pay whatever rate they please, while Herman Cain said he “would like to see no taxes on corporations.” In the Senate, Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) reaction to corporate tax dodging was to call for a corporate tax cut, John Barrasso (R-WY) dismissed the issue because, in his view, “we don’t need more revenue,” and Pat Toomey (R-PA) said corporate taxes are already too high.

Finally, in the House of Representatives, Rob Woodall’s (R-GA) response to corporate tax dodging was to push for “the lowest corporate tax rate we can get,” Jeff Duncan (R-SC) argued that companies like GE are actually paying their fair share, and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) called for completely eliminating the corporate income tax.

Amongst developed nations, America has the weakest labor protections. In fact, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee its workers some form of paid sick leave, even though sick employees attending work and infecting other costs the U.S. economy $180 billion in lost productivity annually.

To remedy this, some cities have taken matters into their own hands, with Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle passing their own paid sick days requirements. Milwaukee passed its own law as well, only to have it overridden by the Republican state legislature, while Philadelphia is inching closer to crafting a law.

There is even one state that decided to implement a statewide requirement that workers be provided with paid time off to deal with illness: Connecticut. Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke with Gov. Dan Malloy (D-CT), who signed Connecticut’s requirement into law. He explained that it “makes no sense at all” for sick employees to attend work, particularly when they’re in professions that involve interaction with vulnerable populations:

There’s no doubt that the very nature of biological interaction forces that to happen. That’s why having sick people come to work in hospitals and nursing homes makes no sense at all, and certainly why having those same folks go to work in a daycare facility where you have a particularly vulnerable population makes no sense at all. So I think in some sense, that reality allows us to have more and more people understand what we’re talking about on a public health benefit.

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We also spoke with Seattle councilmember Nick Licata, who spearheaded his city’s effort to enact a paid sick days requirement. “I think what’s really important about paid sick leave is that it’s a victory where we’re moving something forward as opposed to a victory where we were stopping something bad from happening,” he said. “We have to start thinking about how to make this country a better nation,” instead of “thinking about how to save the last scrap of food on the table.” Watch it:

A paid sick days initiative will appear on the ballot in Denver in November.