When Democrats govern, they try hardest to help red states

When Democrats govern, they try hardest to help red states

Opinion by Paul Waldman

March 3, 2021 at 5:02 a.m. GMT+9

Activists appeal for a $15 minimum wage near the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 25. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

An increase in the minimum wage — long a Democratic priority and a key part of the platform Joe Biden ran on in 2020 — looks to be dead for now:

Senate Democrats and the White House are retreating on efforts to include a $15 minimum-wage increase in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief bill as they aim to move the package forward this week in the Senate.

The House passed the relief bill Saturday with the $15 minimum wage included — even though the Senate parliamentarian had already said the wage increase would not pass muster in the Senate because of the complicated rules governing consideration of the overall bill.

Liberals in the House are pressing the Biden administration to try to overrule the parliamentarian, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki nixed that idea Monday.

The other idea being floated — to create a reconciliation-compatible, backdoor minimum-wage increase by imposing a tax increase on companies that don’t increase their wages — looks to be dead too. (Among other things, it would have only applied to large companies, most of which pay their employees more than the minimum already.)

As of now, the minimum-wage hike’s prospects remains unclear. Which makes it one more victim of minority rule in the Senate, where every piece of legislation that might help people must be sacrificed on the altar of the filibuster, lest Congress start willy-nilly passing laws supported by large majorities of the public.

And that’s the immediate next step for an increase in the minimum wage: It will likely be introduced as a stand-alone bill, Senate Republicans will filibuster it, and that will be that.

At least we can say this: The minimum wage is on the agenda, to the point where even Republicans are floating modest increases; Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) have a proposal to gradually raise it to $10 (in exchange for making employers use the E-Verify system to make sure they aren’t hiring undocumented workers). Republicans have united around opposing $15 as too high, but they’re struggling to defend their opposition to raising the minimum at all. Even big business groups are saying they want to see the minimum wage increase.

But here’s something we haven’t much discussed: What we’re arguing about here is in large part a hand Democrats want give to low-wage workers in red states.

That’s because states can set their own minimum wages, and nearly all the states that have resisted setting a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour are run by Republicans.

There are 20 states that have not raised their own minimums higher than $7.25 (not including Virginia, where a new wage hike will soon take effect, and where the minimum wage will ultimately rise to $12 in 2023). Seventeen of the 20 are states Donald Trump won twice (the others are Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania).

The only place with a $15 minimum wage right now is Washington, D.C.; the next-highest minimum wage is in the state of Washington, whose minimum is now $13.69. So if the minimum were raised to $15, workers nearly everywhere would get a raise. But those raises would be most substantial in states where Republicans are in charge — and, not at all coincidentally, where social services tend to be most meager.

Yet we can count on nearly all Republicans opposing just about any minimum-wage increase Democrats put forward, even the increase to $11 or $12 that conservative Democrats would bargain the increase down to if the filibuster were not stopping it altogether. But even that would be a huge advance.

This is a consistent pattern: When Democrats take power, they try to extend help everywhere — and in some cases, especially to residents of red states. That was the case with the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid. Since states set their own eligibility levels, in many red states the eligibility cutoffs were so absurdly low that if you could afford to clothe yourself in anything but a barrel and suspenders, the state probably considered you too rich to get Medicaid.

And when the ACA allowed anyone earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level to get Medicaid, Republicans sued, and got the Supreme Court to excuse them from having to let more of their own citizens get coverage.

Now contrast that with how Republicans have been arguing against the aid to states and localities included in the covid relief bill. Though that aid would go to every state in the country, Republicans claim it’s a “blue-state bailout,” on the theory that it would be abhorrent for funds to go to places where lots of Democrats live.

When blackouts happened in California, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) mocked them. When blackouts happened in Texas, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) raised millions of dollars to help the people affected.

So is there any hope for a minimum-wage increase? The likely answer is that as long as the filibuster remains in place, it can only happen if Republicans are essentially tricked into voting for it against their will.

That could happen if Democrats added a minimum-wage increase to one of the few bills Republicans will vote for even if there’s something in there they don’t like, such as the yearly defense authorization bill. As Michael Tomasky reminds us, that’s what happened the last time the minimum wage was increased, in 2007: It was tacked on to a bill funding operations in Iraq. (The raise took effect in 2009.)

At the end of last year, Trump vetoed the defense authorization bill because it provided for the names of military bases honoring Confederates to be changed; the veto was overridden. Even if some Republicans backed Trump’s position, they weren’t willing to oppose a defense bill to do it.

The only trouble is that Congress won’t have to pass another defense authorization until the end of this year. On the other hand, people earning the minimum wage have been waiting for a raise for nearly 12 years. So any increase, even one they have to wait longer for, would be better than nothing.