The progressive left that is ascendant in the Democratic Party nationally has a substantial list of demands. Chief among them is raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Why $15? According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-but-really-D-Vermont), the highest profile advocate of hiking it, “For the last 10 years, Congress, giving tax breaks to the rich, has forgotten to raise the minimum wage. We are here to remind them that a $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation minimum wage. Nobody can live on $7.25. You can’t live on $8. You can’t live on $10 an hour.”
When Democrats took the White House and both chambers of Congress in Washington, $15 per hour seemed a fait accompli. Democrats could simply stuff it into the latest must-pass giant COVID-19 relief bill and check that one off the list.
But then something unexpected happened, and New Hampshire Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan had something to do with the surprise.
In the U.S. Senate, Democrats are only at parity with Republicans, with a 50-50 split. The only reason they control the body is because Vice President Kamala Harris is allowed by the Constitution to cast tie-breaking votes.
In many cases, Republicans can still invoke the filibuster to stall legislation that they don’t like, unless the Democrats can get enough of them to go along with voting to end debate. The filibuster does not apply to budget legislation, because the consequences of filibustering a budget could be catastrophic.
But there is a trade-off. To be filibuster-proof, a budget bill cannot deal with extraneous issues, and the Democrats’ appointed Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough sensibly ruled that requiring employers of private businesses to hike wages does not count.
Sanders’s far less restrained progressive colleague in the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had a minor meltdown over this. She tweeted out that it is “utterly embarrassing that ‘pay people enough to live’ is a stance that’s even up for debate.” She ordered the coalition of Senate Democrats and Kamala Harris, “Override the parliamentarian and raise the wage.”
That did not happen in the passage of the COVID relief bill, in part because there simply is not majority support for hiking the federal minimum wage to $15.
New Hampshire’s senators were central characters in this minimum wage drama. Shaheen is willing to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 from the current $7.25, but not $15. Hassan has also supported a hike to $12 in the past. She says she’s willing to talk about raising the wage to $15, but she’s not there yet. Neither was willing to force the issue by tacking it on such important legislation.
For good reason. The American economy was just rocked by a pestilence…
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