When Democrats bragged that they would pass a doubling of the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour as a part of a coronavirus aid deal, they were always lying to you. Unless they were absolute morons, they knew it. So it’s safe to say that all the left-wing pearl-clutching in response to the Senate parliamentarian reminding them of the applicable rules is more performative than outraged.
The legislative filibuster requires 60 votes to pass most bills in the Senate, but the parliamentary procedure of “reconciliation” allows the Senate each year with a simple 50-vote majority to pass a single bill involving spending or the debt limit that is deficit-neutral in a 10-year time frame. Of course, there’s a catch. Among other things, something called the Byrd Rule restricts nonbudget-related policies from being passed via reconciliation. It’s why the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act didn’t outright abolish Obamacare’s individual mandate but rather struck it down to $0, and it’s why the GOP’s bills to overturn Obamacare with just 50 votes were so weak: They were simply hamstrung by the rules.
And that’s a good thing. Without the Byrd Rule, whichever party was in power could making sweeping changes to the country’s civic order with no buy-in from the minority party. The Founding Fathers rightly feared a tyranny of the majority, and guardrails such as the legislative filibuster and the Byrd Rule constricting reconciliation keep simple majorities from overriding all that isn’t expressly protected by the Constitution.
If Democrats want to increase the federal minimum wage, they need to offer centrist Republicans something. Sens. Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton understand this and presented the offer of a minimum wage increase to $10 an hour over five years and then tethering it to inflation, and in exchange, they’d propose mandatory use of an “e-verify” system to catch illegal-immigrant workers and, perhaps more importantly, expanded DHS powers to purge fraud from Social Security rolls. Dislike that proposal? Fine, then make another offer. But for far too long, politicians on both sides of the aisle have legislated by LARPing political theater, simply holding out until they hopefully get a supermajority again.
Compromising isn’t a sign of weakness. It is quite literally how a democratic system is supposed to work. Don’t blame the parliamentarian or even the rules for not rigging it for Democrats. Instead, work across the aisle.
