WASHINGTON (AP) – Democrats’ hopes of including a minimum wage increase in their $ 1.9 trillion aid bill in COVID-19 seemed almost dead on Monday as the Senate prepared to debate its own version. aid package approved by the Chamber.
Four days after the House MP said that Senate rules prohibit the inclusion of a direct minimum wage increase in the relief measure, Democrats appeared to have exhausted their most realistic options for quickly saving the salary increase. In a decision, they abandoned a possible amendment that threatened tax increases on large companies that did not raise workers’ wages to certain levels.
“Right now, we may not have a way, but I hope we can find one” to push the federal pay floor to $ 15 an hour, said the second Democratic Senate leader, Richard Durbin, of Illinois.
Senate Democrats hope to reveal their version of the broad aid package and start the debate as early as Wednesday. Congressional leaders want to send President Joe Biden legislation to combat the pandemic and strengthen the economy by March 14, the date when the emergency unemployment benefits that lawmakers passed in December expire.
The general relief bill is Biden’s highest initial legislative priority. Appears as an initial test of your ability to unite Democrats in the Senate – where the party has no votes left – and risk lasting damage to its influence if it fails. Republicans are strongly against legislation and it could very well oppose it unanimously, as Republican Party lawmakers did when the House passed the bill early on Saturday.
The measure would provide payments of $ 1,400 to individuals, in addition to hundreds of billions of dollars for schools and colleges, vaccines and COVID-19 tests, mass transit systems, tenants and small businesses. It also has money for childcare, tax breaks for families with children, and assistance for states that want to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income residents.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Said he wanted Democrats to ignore the congressman’s decision to block the increase in the minimum wage. He also wants them to vote to remove the obstruction – procedural delays that would lead to an unattainable 60 votes for Democrats to prevail.
None of the ideas appeared to have the support of Democrats or the White House needed to succeed. But Sanders, the main sponsor of the $ 15 increase in the Senate, said he would force the vote on an amendment by restoring the minimum wage increase anyway.
“This is the soul of the Democratic Party,” he said of the proposal. Recognizing that his effort may fail, he said: “If we fail in this legislation, I will be back” and will present it in the near future.
The Senate is split 50-50 between parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to cast only tiebreakers. Democrats are employing a procedure rarely used for the COVID-19 relief bill that will protect the measure from obstructions.
Biden discussed the relief bill on Monday at a virtual meeting with nine Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an opponent of the $ 15 an hour goal. A White House statement said the group was “united in the goal of quickly approving a significant package that reflects the scope of the challenges that our country is facing”.
Democrats, who will need unanimity to pass the legislation, are pushing for several changes to the House measure.
Manchin told reporters that he wants the project’s emergency unemployment benefits, set at $ 400 a week by the House, to revert to the current $ 300 enacted in December. This will certainly cause division and attract strong opposition from progressives.
He and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Also said they want spending to be more “targeted”, which Manchin said means “helping the people who need the most help”. Republicans said the legislation is very expensive and spends money unnecessarily.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said he wants $ 350 billion for state and local governments to specify minimum values for city governments and wants perhaps $ 50 billion to improve broadband coverage.
The congressman decided on Monday that some provisions passed by the House, which would provide billions to help some struggling pension plans and to help people who lost jobs to pay for health insurance, could stay on the bill, according to the president of the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, D-Miner.
The minimum wage text approved by the House would gradually raise the federal floor to $ 15 an hour by 2025, more than double the $ 7.25 in effect since 2009.
After the congressman said the provision would have to be deleted, Sanders and Wyden said they were working on plans to raise taxes on large corporations that do not meet certain levels of workers’ pay.
But that plan was abandoned, Democrats said on Monday, with Sanders saying the proposal would have been too easy for employers to flee. It has always been questionable whether pressuring companies with tax increases would have obtained enough Democratic support to survive, and the idea would have affected only a fraction of the workers who pay the minimum wage.
The increase in the minimum wage has broad support among Democrats. But while he is passionately embraced by the party’s progressives, at least two Senate moderates – Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have expressed opposition to including him in the broader relief measure, hurting his prospects and fomenting tensions within the party.
Democrats must now decide “how we are going to make the minimum wage as part of other legislation or on our own,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Although eliminating obstructors or canceling the parliamentary has strong support among progressives, the ideas do not attract moderates. They are afraid to erase 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 have long supported maintaining the obstruction is Biden, who served for almost four decades in the Senate.
“The president’s view of the obstruction is well known. He hasn’t changed that point of view, ”White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday.
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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.