Saturday, March 6, 2021

The Democrats' defeat on the $15 minimum wage

When I woke up this morning, the Twitter algorithms showed me this.


That list again:


AOL had a sensible reaction.

This is a bad thing, substantively and (for the Democrats) politically.

It should be a bad thing politically for the Republicans, too. But they have so QAnon-ized their brand that I guess opposing a minimum wage increase just seems like a normal part of white identity politics to the faithful. Besides, they are presently concerned wtih defending Dr. Seuss and the honor of Neanderthals, the archaic humans who disappeared as a distinct group 25 thousand years or so ago.

Substantively, an increase in the minimum wage is overdue. The US Labor Department has a helpful history of the federal minimum wage since it began, History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938-2009. We are currently in the longest period since 1938 that it hasn't been raised.

Politically, the Democrats need to deliver concrete benefits to working people. And they need to support the expansion of labor unions. Living wages and labor unions are good things in themselves, of course. But if the Democrats want to strategically strengthen their own party in the face of the current Republican structural advantages combined with their fanaticism, they need to strengthen themselves with working class voters.

The increase in the minimum wage polls as being incredibly popular. For average voters, the message comes across that the Democrats control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Joe Biden campaigned for President and won by seven million votes committed to the $15 minimum wage. And he supported including it in the COVID relief bill.

But they failed to pass it.

To the extent that people followed the procedural chatter that led up to the minimum wage vote - well, there was the parliamentarian no one had ever heard of before, and the reconciliation thing, and the filibuster, sacred Senate traditions, yadda, yadda - most will take the lesson that the Democrats had a lot of excuses but just failed to deliver on this basic vote on the minimum wage. (Which, sadly, is what actually just happened.)

The Republicans, on the other hand, are both shameless and more aggressive in their messaging. So the Republicans in Congress make a solid wall against a minimum wage increase. As during the Obama-Biden Administration, the Republicans are trying to obstruct as many Democratic priorities as they can. But that approach is not just about the policies involved. It's also performatively showing that they can slap the Democrats around.

So the Republicans in a situation like this can both vote against the minimum wage increase and mock the Democrats for being losers for not getting their own program passed. And it's easy to imagine the Trump Party's current Leader For Life declaring, "The Democrats control the White House and Congress after they sole the election from me. They promised to wage the minimum wage to $15 and then the Democrats themselves voted it down. But if I'm elected President again, I'll get it done right away!"

Trump wouldn't actually push to raise the minimum wage. of course, But he would certainly do the demagoguery. The point is, the Democrats negotiate publicly against each other to not deliver the popular policy that Biden himself ran on. That Biden ran on and won the vote by a large margin, we're not talking about Bernie Sanders' program in the primary. While the Republicans can be seen regularly fighting stubbornly for their own positions, unpopular though most of them are.

And using any procedural trick they can find to do so. While the Democrats look like they are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Yeah, we're in control, but, hey, there are all these procedures and stuff, so we can't really do much, but elect us an even bigger majority in Congress, and maybe we can do something then."

You don't have to be particularly cynical to wonder if Biden and Harris were always intending to use the $15 minimum wage in the COVID relief package as a bargaining chip they would happily give up.

In the weeds of the procedural considerations, there were alternative possibilities. The most straightforward and sensible one would have been to vote away the antidemocratic filibuster rule, which has since the days of John Calhoun been used almost exclusively to block proposals that reactionaries and conservatives didn't like, and only amplifies the already nondemocratic representative balance in the Senate. Then the Democrats could have used their 51-vote majority (including the Vice President as presiding officer of the Senate) to pass the full COVID relief package.

A second alternative was to use the reconciliation process, which itself actually began as a workaround from the filibuster, allowing a bill to be passed by simple majorities in both Houses. (David Wessel, What is reconciliation in Congress? Brookings Institute 02/05/2021) The House passed the COVID bill including the $15 minimum wage. The Senate parliamentarian, a non-elected, advisory position, argued that the minimum wage change should not be included in a bill passed by reconciliation.

But the actual decision on that point belongs the presiding officer of the Senate,  i.e., Vice President Kamala Harris, or her designee. The procedural point had to do with whether the minimum wage adjustment would affect the federal budget, in which case it can be done through reconciliation. And there's an entirely plausible reason to think it does affect the budget.

So then the procedural question passed to the Senate Budget Committee, currently chaired by Bernie Sanders, who had to decide whether to include it in the Senate version or not. In a decision that presumably included information from the Vice President on whether she would adopt the parliamentarian's recommendation or not. If that version including the $15 change had been the bill presented to the Senate, the Democratic opponents would have had to vote for taking it out of the bill. Instead, the bill was presented to the Senate without the $15 change and the Senators were acting to vote to put it back into the Senate version.

That's not an easy thing to squeeze into a clear slogan. "We're fighting for the $15 wage and the Republicans are unanimously against it" is a clear message. On the other hand, "Well, most of the Democrats wanted it, but there was the parliamentarian, and the reconciliation, and a separate vote up or down, and we couldn't get it done. But, hey, we only control the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, you can't actually expect us to do things we said we were going to do" - that's not a clear slogan. In fact, it's nothing but an excuse.

Given that the business lobbies opposed the minimum wage increase, it would likely have failed to pass if the anti-living-wage Democrats had been forced to take the initiative to vote to remove it, instead of having to decline to vote to include it. But I tend to think the former would have been a closer vote than what actually happened.

The New Republic's Alex Pareene summarizes the results this way.


To summarize again:
  • The Democrats as a party supported the very popular minimum wage increase, an increase that is seriously overdue.
  • The Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress but failed to pass it.
  • Even though the Republicans solidly oppose the minimum wage increase, they will be happy to mock the Democrats as losers for not passing it. And they are often better at that kind of messaging than the Democrats are at countering it.
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