House Democrats passed their sweeping $1.9 trillion Covid Relief bill in a party-line vote early Saturday morning, advancing President Biden’s top legislative priority.
The Hill reports, House Democrats pass sweeping $1.9T COVID-19 relief bill with minimum wage hike:
Lawmakers passed the bill 219-212, with two Democrats — Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Kurt Schrader (Ore.) — joining all Republicans in voting against it. Democrats could only afford up to four defections with their narrow House majority.
I don’t know what their lame excuse was, but why do Republicans hate America? “No help for you!”
The relief package now heads to the Senate, where Democrats are expected to amend it next week and send it back to the House for approval before unemployment insurance benefits expire on March 14.
The legislation, which was modeled after Biden’s proposal, includes provisions to provide a third round of direct stimulus checks of up to $1,400 for individuals, a $400 weekly unemployment insurance boost through Aug. 29, and $8.5 billion in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to distribute, track and promote public confidence in COVID-19 vaccines.
The direct payments of up to $1,400 for individuals or $2,800 for married couples are the largest pandemic impact payments yet, after the two previous rounds last year maxed out at $1,200 and $600.
Individuals with incomes of up to $75,000 and married couples earning up to $150,000 would be eligible for the full amounts, while the payments would phase out for individuals making up to $100,000 or $200,000 for couples.
Other key parts of the massive package include $350 billion for state and local governments, $130 billion to help K-12 schools reopen for in-person classroom instruction, and an expansion of the child tax credit to $3,000 per child or $3,600 for children under six years of age.
But one component of the bill that the House passed early Saturday is doomed to be left on the cutting room floor once it reaches the Senate: an increase in the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 per hour to $15.
House Democrats opted to keep the minimum wage provision in the bill as a show of support for the top progressive priority.
Not necessarily. The Vice President can disregard the parliamentarian’s ruling and let Democrats vote for the House bill. President Biden has to agree to allow her to do it. Some Democrats are already talking about doing what Republicans did when they got an adverse ruling from the Senate parliamentarian: Some Democrats want to fire the Senate parliamentarian who scuttled $15 minimum-wage plans. It’s been done once before.
Are Democrats going to allow a seditious violent insurrectionist minority party to filibuster a badly needed and popular Covid Relief bill because it has a long overdue increase in the minimum wage that the American people demand? Have Democrats lost their will to play hardball? It’s time to nuke the damn filibuster and to deliver for the American people! We have major civil rights and voting rights legislation moving over to the Senate in coming weeks, it’s time to take away Mitch McConnell’s weapon of mass destruction and to render him irrelevant.
Democrats get reelected by delivering on their promises to the American people. Are you listening, Senator Sinema?
“Even if it is inconceivable to some, it is inevitable to us. And we will work diligently to shorten the distance between the inevitable and the inconceivable,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of raising the wage.
See! Nancy knows how to play hardball. This is how the game is played.
The push to raise the minimum wage to $15 has been met with strong pushback from Republicans and a handful of centrist Democratic lawmakers [Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are on record], who cited a Congressional Budget Office report estimating that while it would lift 900,000 people out of poverty, it would also lead to 1.4 million job losses.
The CBO’s flawed analysis is disputed by the Economic Policy Institute. It also establishes why the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling was wrongly decided. CBO analysis confirms that a $15 minimum wage raises earnings of low-wage workers, reduces inequality, and has significant and direct fiscal effects:
In our analysis released last week …We believe that the CBO’s assumptions on the scale of job loss are just wrong and inappropriately inflated relative to what cutting-edge economics literature would indicate. The median employment effect of the minimum wage across studies of low-wage workers is essentially zero, according to a 2019 review of the evidence. (ref., Dube, Arindrajit. 2019, Impacts of minimum wages: review of the international evidence, Report prepared for Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK), November.)
Only one sitting House Democrat, Rep. Kurt Schrader (Ore.), voted against a bill in 2019 to raise the minimum wage to $15. While Schrader’s preference for a regionally-adjusted minimum wage [this only locks in low wage states’ abuse of low wage workers] over a federal statute for $15 didn’t threaten the relief package’s prospects in the House, it’s a more delicate balance for Democrats’ 50-50 standing in the Senate.
Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) both expressed opposition to including the $15 minimum wage as part of the COVID-19 relief package [slavishly adhering to the Byrd Rule.] Manchin has called for increasing the minimum wage to $11 per hour instead, arguing it’s a more reasonable level for a state like West Virginia. [Again, this only locks in low wage states’ abuse of low wage workers.]
Democrats are weighing proposals from Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would impose penalties on large corporations that don’t pay employees at least $15 an hour and incentivize small businesses to increase workers’ wages.
A senior Democratic aide said Friday that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is considering adding such a provision to the relief package, while top House Democrats were still noncommittal on the idea.
This sounds chickenshit to me. Just do what needs to be done: overrule the parliamentarian, or nuke the damn filibuster to deliver for the American people!
UPDATE: “Senior Democrats are abandoning a backup plan to increase the minimum wage through a corporate tax penalty, after encountering numerous practical and political challenges in drafting their proposal over the weekend,” the Washington Post reports.
The final vote on the pandemic relief package didn’t occur until well after midnight on Saturday because Republicans delayed proceedings for several hours by speaking before the House Rules Committee on the more than 200 amendments they submitted to the bill.
Mitch McConnell’s policy of “total obstruction” in action.
None of the GOP amendments, which ran the gamut from stripping the bill of the minimum wage provision to requiring K-12 schools to have reopening plans for in-person teaching in place in order to access full funding, were granted floor time.
It’s possible that Democrats could pass a separate bill to increase the minimum wage, but it would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to clear a Senate GOP filibuster.
“I guarantee you there’ll be a raise in the minimum wage before the election,” House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) told reporters in the Capitol. “Hold me to it.”
Progressives are calling for Vice President Harris, the president of the Senate, to overrule the parliamentarian’s advisory opinion or for Democrats to abolish the filibuster to ensure that the campaign promise of a minimum wage increase can eventually become law under Biden.
“So it’s not just about minimum wage, because Democrats made a lot of promises in winning the House, the Senate and the White House. And it’s going to come up again and again. So we’re gonna have to make a choice here. Are we going to stick to these rules or are we actually going to use the levers of government to work for the people?” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)
“To me that’s not radical — that’s governing.”
The Senate parliamentarian even disregarded the case made by the man who actually wrote the damn book on Senate budget procedure:
[F]or one Senate committee staffer — who was brought out of retirement by Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders only a few weeks ago — the loss may particularly sting: Bill Dauster, chief counsel for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Budget Committee.
Dauster has long been known on Capitol Hill as a budget process expert extraordinaire, having literally written a book, “Budget Process Law Annotated,” on the subject during his more than 30 years on the Hill.
“I was proud to have argued the case for the minimum wage in reconciliation. The Parliamentarian decided incorrectly,” Dauster tweeted after the decision.
* * *
Dauster’s insight was that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was prepared to make a more in-depth study of the indirect effects of a minimum-wage increase on the federal budget, not just an estimate of how much more the government itself would spend on paying its workers a higher wage, and that that could then change the parliamentary equation.
In January, Dauster authored a guest op-ed in Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill. While conventional wisdom argued a minimum-wage boost would have too little budget impact to avoid running afoul of the Byrd rule prohibition on “extraneous” material in reconciliation bills, Dauster in his op-ed said even those relatively minor impacts, as scored by the CBO for a 2019 minimum-wage bill, should be enough to avoid the Byrd prohibition on “merely incidental” budget effects.
“So it comes down to a judgment of whether the budget effects of raising the minimum wage are ‘merely incidental’ to its nonbudgetary effects,” he wrote.
A few weeks later, the CBO issued a score for an updated minimum-wage bill, taking a broader look at its impact on the economy and how that would affect the government’s finances. That score found it would increase the deficit by $54 billion over an 11-year period, the CBO said, “using techniques [CBO] has developed over the past two years.” That compared with a $76 million deficit increase for the 2019 bill.
In his January op-ed, Dauster also noted that the 2017 tax cuts passed by Republicans under reconciliation contained provisions to zero out the penalty for people not buying health insurance and to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration.
“If it could do those things, it should be able to raise the minimum wage,” Dauster wrote of reconciliation.
On Feb. 15, at Sanders’ request, the CBO sent a him letter comparing the breadth of those impacts — how many budget subject areas they touched — with the breadth of a minimum-wage boost. The CBO said the wage boost’s impact would indeed be felt in more areas, an answer Democrats likely knew before they requested the letter but now had on public record.
I know that President Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain has said the administration will abide by the parliamentarian’s ruling. This comes from Biden’s decades steeped in Senate culture. He is being far too deferential. The Senate he worked in no longer exists, it is being abused by a minority party of seditious violent insurrectionists. America does not negotiate with terrorists, foreign or domestic.
President Biden and Ron Klain seriously need to reconsider having Vice President Kamala Harris overrule this incorrect decision by the Senate parliamentarian (she does not need to be fired), and vote on the House bill. It is also time to nuke the damn filibuster and to deliver for the American people on civl rights and voting rights legislation in the coming weeks.
Fintan O’Toole makes an excellent point at the New York Review of Books (subscription required for full article), “To Hell with Unity”, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/03/25/joe-biden-to-hell-with-unity/
(excerpt)
Indeed, in Biden’s own previous analysis, the “ethic of division” in contemporary American politics took hold as early as the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans stormed to victory under the banner of Newt Gingrich’s radically right-wing Contract with America, in the process winning more House seats in the South than the Democrats for the first time since Reconstruction. If this is so, almost thirty years of calls for mutual respect and tolerance have been not just rebuffed but flung back with contempt. There surely comes a time when repeated declarations of unrequited love look less like fidelity and more like madness, a time to see the bonds of affection tying party to party as bonds in the other sense, chains that shackle the democratic majority to the will of a fiercely intractable minority.
What Biden surely understands by now is that he does not have to break those fetters—the Republican Party has done the job for him. The willingness of most congressional Repubicans to endorse Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the November election and their unwillingness to convict Trump for his role in the violent putsch of January 6 may be horrifying. But these choices are also clarifying. There can be no illusions of accord, or even of civilized dispute. There is only a minority that will do everything in its considerable power to thwart, to wreck, to undermine.
There should be a kind of liberation in this implacable hatred. Biden has been freed, by the failure of the Republicans to move beyond Trumpism, to shake off his pursuit of consensus politics.
Biden was wonderful in his landmark speech this morning. Give me money, I’ll buy your cars and refrigerators. Demand side economics.
And a wage raise is good policy, Paul Krugman says
$15 may be too much to for some states–other than New York and CA -to carry, Krugman said on MSNBC. But a raise would be good economic policy,.
.
Why, after McConnell screwed us with Merrick Garland can’t Harris fire the Parlimentarian?
See Harris at 5 on MSNBC on the Sharpton Show.
Because Biden is a creature of the Senate, and his chief of staff says he will abide by the parliamentarian’s ruling. I don’t see any reason to abide by a clearly incorrect ruling that is only advisory in nature – the Senate is not required to follow her opinion.