Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday privately urged Democrats to remain united in an effort to pass a massive COVID-19 aid spending bill by a mid-March deadline, despite differences over whether the bill should include a minimum wage hike.
“He’s begging all of us, despite any differences with any one section of the bill, that we hang together,” Majority Whip Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said after the party’s weekly caucus luncheon. “This is the signature provision of the Biden administration in terms of dealing with the pandemic. And the economy, and we, need to stick together. That’s it.”
Senate Democrats aren’t sure whether they’ll be able to pass a $15 minimum wage mandate that is included in the massive COVID-19 aid spending bill. The provision faces opposition from within their own party and could be ruled out of order by Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.
Schumer and Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders will meet Wednesday with MacDonough to determine whether the mandatory wage hike would violate special rules they hope to use to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid spending bill with only 51 votes instead of the usual 60.
MacDonough may rule to exclude the $15 hourly wage provision because it does not meet the requirements under a process called reconciliation that Senate Democrats plan to employ to stop the GOP from filibustering the bill.
If MacDonough tells Schumer and Sanders the $15 wage provision can stay in the bill, Democrats face another obstacle: Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema aren’t in favor of a mandatory $15 minimum wage, and the party cannot pass the measure unless all 50 Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris vote for it.
Manchin, of West Virginia, has pitched an alternative $11 minimum wage hike, but Democratic leaders are refusing to back his lower number and are holding out for passage of the COVID-19 aid spending bill with the $15 minimum wage mandate intact.
“Bernie Sanders and I are arguing very strongly for $15 and for it to be reconcilable,” Schumer said Tuesday. “We’re going to await [MacDonough’s] judgment before we go any further.”
The House is expected to pass the COVID-19 aid spending package later this week before sending it to the Senate. It would provide a new round of $1,400 stimulus checks and $400 in enhanced jobless pay.
The measure also would raise the minimum wage to $15 over the next four years. Schumer said the Senate must pass the measure before March 14, when the latest round of enhanced federal unemployment benefits expires.
The minimum wage hike has become a major sticking point within the Democratic Party.
Congress last raised the minimum wage in 2009 to $7.25, and many Democrats say a significant increase is long overdue and widely supported by the public.
“We’ve got tens of millions of workers working for starvation wages,” Sanders told reporters in the Capitol. “It is an absolute national disgrace. Fifteen dollars an hour is not a radical idea.”
But Manchin and other Democrats support a smaller increase.
Manchin said he would vote to amend the legislation to increase the minimum wage to $11 over the next two years.
He said businesses in small rural areas like those in West Virginia “would get eviscerated” by a $15-per-hour wage requirement. The $11 requirement could be phased in quickly, Manchin said, and would lift low-wage earners above the poverty level.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined raising the wage to $15 would result in 1.4 million fewer jobs.
“Throwing $15 out there right now just makes it very difficult in rural America,” Manchin told reporters in the Capitol.
Without the support of Manchin and Sinema, the COVID-19 aid spending bill would stall in the Senate. Failure to pass the bill would be a major defeat for President Biden, who sent the spending package to Congress as his No. 1 legislative priority when he took office on Jan. 20.
Biden said earlier this month he does not believe the minimum wage provision will end up in the COVID-19 aid package, even though he included it in the proposal his administration delivered to Congress.
“I put it in, but I don’t think it’s going to survive,” Biden told CBS News.
Biden promised “a separate negotiation” on minimum wage legislation if the provision doesn’t pass with the COVID-19 aid spending bill.
