WASHINGTON -- Democrats' efforts to include a minimum wage increase in their $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief bill seemed all but dead Monday as Senate leaders prepared to begin debating their own version of the House-passed aid package.
Top Democrats abandoned a potential amendment threatening tax increases on big companies that don't boost workers' pay to certain levels, Senate aides said. Four days after the chamber's parliamentarian said Senate rules forbid inclusion of a straight-out minimum wage increase in the relief measure, Democrats seemed to have exhausted their most realistic options for quickly salvaging the pay hike.
"At this moment, we may not have [a] path, but I hope we can find one" for pushing the federal pay floor to $15 an hour, said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.
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Senate Democrats hope to unveil their version of the broad relief package and begin debate as early as Wednesday. Congressional leaders want to send President Joe Biden the legislation combating the pandemic and bolstering the economy by March 14, when the emergency jobless benefits that lawmakers approved in December expire.
As Democrats rush to deliver the bill to Biden's desk, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. and a close ally of the president's, acknowledged the lack of Republican support.
"Frankly, we're moving ahead with a bill that probably will get no Republican votes in the Senate but will have broad Republican support in the country," Coons said Sunday on CNN.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., kept up his attacks on the legislation Monday, decrying it as a "bonanza of partisan spending they're calling a pandemic rescue package" and lamenting, "It didn't have to be this way."
The bill is Biden's biggest early legislative priority. It looms as an initial test of his ability to unite Democrats in the Senate -- where the party has no votes to spare -- and risks lasting damage to his influence should he fail. Republicans are strongly against the legislation and could well oppose it unanimously, as House GOP lawmakers did when that chamber approved the bill early Saturday.
"The president's focus this week and in coming weeks, until it's passed, is on the American Rescue Plan," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. "It's absolutely critical Congress act, and we certainly hope they do that as quickly as possible."
Biden discussed the relief bill Monday in a virtual meeting with nine Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an opponent of the $15 minimum wage. A White House statement said the group was "united in the goal of quickly passing a significant package that reflects the scope of the challenges our country is facing."
The Senate is divided 50-50 between the parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to cast tie-breaking votes. Under the streamlined rules the Democrats are using, they can approve the legislation with just 51 votes.
The overall bill would provide $1,400 payments to individuals plus hundreds of billions of dollars for schools and colleges, covid-19 vaccines and testing, mass transit systems, renters and small businesses. It also has tax breaks for families with children and states willing to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income residents as well as money for child care.
"I expect a hearty debate and some late nights," Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Monday. "But the American people sent us here with a job to do: to help the country through this moment of extraordinary challenge. To end, through action, the greatest health crisis our country has faced in a century. And that's just what we're going to do."
TINKERING CONTINUES
Democrats are considering several changes in the House measure, but they seem modest compared with dropping the minimum wage increase. One top aide said the bill the Senate initially debates won't have the minimum wage provision in it, saying the language would have pushed the bill over budget-mandated spending limits, violating Senate rules.
Monday's call with Biden included Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Angus King, I-Maine, who have proposed breaking off some of the state and local money and dedicating it to expanded broadband instead.
Other Democratic senators are pushing for changes related to the unemployment insurance in the bill, which would increase the weekly $300 payments to $400 and extend them through August. Warner wants to restore a month's worth of unemployment benefits to the bill so they run through September, an idea also endorsed by Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., but that would require paying for it from elsewhere in the bill.
King has also called for tying unemployment benefits to state unemployment rates, so the value of the benefit diminishes as the local economy improves.
"If the economy is coming back more rapidly than we expect, let's ratchet back the expenditures," King said.
Democrats are still waiting on the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, to offer guidance on whether a few other provisions, including pension funding and health care subsidies that allow laid-off workers to remain on their former employer's health plan for some time, violate Senate rules. Republicans could also challenge certain provisions within the plan as extraneous or failing to have a substantial direct effect on the federal budget.
The House-approved minimum wage language would gradually raise the federal floor to $15 an hour by 2025, more than double the $7.25 in place since 2009.
After the parliamentarian said that provision would have to be deleted, Wyden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said they were working on plans to increase taxes on large corporations that don't meet certain levels for workers' pay. Sanders is chief Senate sponsor of the $15 plan, while Wyden is chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.
But three Senate aides, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Monday that party leaders were dropping those proposals.
It was always questionable whether pressuring companies with tax increases would win enough Democratic support to survive. The White House didn't endorse the tax proposals, which would have affected only a fraction of workers paid the minimum wage.
Raising the minimum has broad support among Democrats. But while it's embraced by the party's progressives, at least two Senate moderates -- Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. -- have voiced opposition to including it in the broader relief measure, wounding its prospects and fostering tensions within the party.
The tepid Democratic reaction to the tax plan has left the party looking at potentially pushing a minimum wage increase in future legislation, where it could well face enough GOP opposition to kill it.
Democrats must now decide "how we do minimum wage as part of another piece of legislation or on its own," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
As an alternative, progressives want Senate Democrats to simply overrule the parliamentarian and include the pay raise anyway, or to eliminate Senate filibusters -- procedural delays that let a minority party kill legislation that lacks at least 60 votes.
But those ideas seem to lack enough Democratic support to succeed. Senate moderates are wary of erasing procedures that the party has used in the past, and could use again, to protect its priorities when it is in the minority.
Among those who've long supported retaining the filibuster is Biden, who served nearly four decades in the Senate.
"The president's view on the filibuster is well known. He has not changed that point of view," Psaki said Monday.
Despite seeming White House opposition, nearly two dozen House progressives tried pressuring Biden to have Harris join Democratic senators and vote to override the parliamentarian and include the increase in the bill anyway.
"Outdated and complex" Senate rules "must not be an impediment to improving people's lives," the House members, led by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to Biden and Harris. "You have the authority to deliver a raise for millions of Americans."
Information for this article was contributed by Alan Fram and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; by Erica Werner, Jeff Stein and Tony Romm of The Washington Post; and by Luke Broadwater and Emily Cochrane of The New York Times.
