Coop Scoop 3/1: "The Minimum Fight For The Minimum Wage

The Democratic leadership starts to bury the $15 min. wage

March 1, 2021

Issue #65

By Marc Cooper

There are, indeed, two Republican Parties.  And I refer not to the divisions between the Cheney-McConnell crew and the Trumpists.  That battle is over.

Here’s the real divide:  There’s The Republican Party that grotesquely sloshes around in the fetid fever swamp of CPAC, basking in the sulphuric waters of overt racism and xenophobia, accusing Biden of being “left of Lenin,” exalting in just about every insidious bias that afflicts American culture, disdaining rule of law, incorporating a domestic paramilitary into its ranks, and pledging allegiance to an empty-headed inert golden calf anthropomorphized to resemble The Great Leader. All the while denying the legitimacy of our last election and celebrating the January 6th Trumpanzee siege of the White House. It’s a party that has exactly no platform other than idol worship and subversion of democratic process.

That’s one Republican Party.  The other is the GOP that exists primarily in the head of Joe Biden and some other leading Democrats, one that is loaded with very nice reasonable graybeard Senators and a few open-minded junior members who secretly admire Joe Biden as a former colleague. Some of these guys have worked with Biden for more than three decades and, it is assumed, that with some more coaxing, at least ten of them can be brought over to negotiate and pass key parts of Biden’s agenda and everyone will go home happily to a Normal America.

Sorry. The only real Republican Party is that first one.  Look no further than the House vote this weekend on the Democrat-sponsored $1.9 trillion COVID relief (I think survival is a better descriptor) bill.  Out of more than 200 Republican members, a grand total of three voted Yes.  Less than 3% of the Republican caucus.

And when that measure comes before the Senate for approval in the coming week or two, all forecasts indicate there will be zero Republican votes.  That is to say that not a single Republican senator will approve the billions to grease the vaccine roll-out, billions to re-open schools, billions to extend unemployment payments past March 14, billions to aid the depleted coffers of state and local governments (and their employees), billions to issue $1400 checks to every qualifying American, and billions to raise the child tax credit that can immediately lift a million or two kids out of poverty..

This package as a whole has about 70% popular support and some components of it have more than 80% approval. Even the minimum wage provision (which will be stripped out in the Senate) has a 61% popularity rating).  Note: minimum wage increases were approved in November in Florida and other states where Trump handily won; it is authentically a non-partisan issue.

There’s some simple math to do here.  If Republicans will offer no support to such an overwhelmingly popular measure as the COVID aid bill (running therefore few if any political risks), how on earth can Democrats believe for one moment that they are going to get sufficient Republican support for much more controversial measures.  Do they really believe ten Republican senators will materialize to pass the $15 minimum wage, massive electoral reform via H.R.1, Senate passage of the Equality Act, immigration reform, police reform, climate change and so on down the line?

Meanwhile, we see the rising emergence of two Democratic parties. The one that Biden and his supporters conjured up for the elections: a reborn, re-awakened party of reform, spurred by a younger and more diverse base, pushed by progs like Bernie Sanders, and determined to make America a much better and a much fairer place.

Then there’s the other Democratic Party. The one that sits in Congress and collects donations and  one that populates the top of our federal agencies as well as many state and local governments.  As opposed to the party evoked during the campaign, this party is much more comfortable with tweaking the status quo, avoiding big confrontations, and like their Republican counterparts are concerned mostly with winning re-election.

The struggle between those two Democratic parties remains unresolved.  There are disturbing signs however that the more conservative Democratic Party is beginning to flex its dominant weight.

The immediate surrender on the $15 minimum wage is Exhibit A.  Biden and his Chief of Staff Ron Klain were already publicly writing obituaries for that issue before the Senate Parliamentarian made her ruling to exclude the wage hike from the COVID relief package as in her opinion, it did not meet the requirements to be passed with only 51 votes via the so-called reconciliation process.

Is it too paranoid to think that Biden and Klain were intentionally tipping their hands, signaling to the parliamentarian that she need not worry about ruling against the wage?

Hardly.  It’s an open secret that Biden and for that matter Schumer and Pelosi were secretly gratified by getting rid of the wage hike as part of the COVID bill. That paved the way for the real shadow president, West Virginal Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, to vote yes when the COVID bill comes to the floor.  He had previously stated he would in no way support the $15 wage and that put his imperative yes vote on the whole package in doubt.

Now The Democrats are putting on quite a Kabuki performance, grimacing and whining and promising that, don’t worry, one way or another we will get this wage increase passed (the only viable way I see is to attach it to some must-pass bill like a defense spending appropriation but there is no guarantee on that).

While top Democrats were all joining in the chorus that they would nevertheless pass the measure eventually without explaining how, there were at least a few dozen Democrats who actually seemed serious about making it real. On Monday morning, twenty-three members of Democratic Progressive Caucus sent a letter to V.P. Harris saying in part:

“Eighty-one million people cast their ballots to elect you on a platform that called for a $15 minimum wage. We urge you to keep that promise,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Harris and President Joe Biden, pressing the White House to raise the wage for workers as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan. “We must act now to prevent tens of millions of hardworking Americans from being underpaid any longer.”

The letter obliquely but undeniably suggests that Harris use her power as President of the Senate to simply ignore the ruling of the parliamentarian or fire and replace her.  Just for the record, any such action would be completely legal and has been done before by both parties.

If the administration went that route, the only obstacle to passing the $15 wage would be two conservative (not moderate!) Democrats, Manchin and Sinema of Nevada) who would need to be brought to heel by the party and much more importantly by a public mobilized and led by the White House to pressure them.

I believe that is all scheduled for 9:00 A.M. the day after Hell freezes over.

Biden and Harris are kicking the can down the road and not listening. “The vice president's not going to weigh in,” Biden National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said Friday on CNBC. “The president and the vice president both respect the parliamentarian's decision and the process.”

That’s nice.  Even if it does raise the question of how much respect they have for the 37 million people who currently earn the minimum wage, a majority of whom are over age 25 and work full time as essential and frontline workers.  Perhaps, we can get them a serving or two of cake to make up for the next anemic paycheck they will get.

Bernie Sanders’  had come with a Plan B for rescuing the $15 wage.  He had proposed and won substantial acceptance for a scheme that would impose an increased payroll tax on large companies that didn’t pay the wage hike and would provide tax cuts for small companies that did.

That plan, too, was scuttled by the leadership.

I am hesitant to beat this to death but I feel I have no choice: what about dumping the filibuster?  Do that, and it is clear sailing.  Not just on the minimum wage, but on the antire Biden agenda that, in this way, could easily be implemented before the 2022 mid-terms.

If the Democrats think they don’t have the full 50 votes needed to do it, then, damnit, spend your energy lobbying those recalcitrants inside your party instead of uselessly spinning wheels looking for Republican legislative support that will never materialize – unless of course you water down your proposals enough so they are Republican-friendly.

Biden and other top Dems have said the filibuster is not under consideration.  Oh, please.  Of course it is.  It’s just that too many Democrats are afraid to pull the trigger. And honestly, I cannot figure out why.  As I have stated before, if they are afraid Republicans will use a simple majority against them when back in power, they should remember that Republicans would also need only 51 votes to quash the filibuster rule, so what is the great danger?

The only answer I can come up with as to why the Democrats are being so meek, especially in a policy area that would only greatly benefit them if enacted, is that the party bosses just don’t see the world the same way some of us grunts do.

It seems obvious to me that the last 5 years have greatly transformed American politics and has also accelerated the deepening economic chasm in the United States while creating an unprecedented crisis in public consciousness.  We also have a weakened if not completely dysfunctional legislative branch.  We have a judicial branch that has been stocked to the brim with out-of-touch extremists.  We have a rising right wing paramilitary.  There has been no real accountability for the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol.  There are dozens of states, controlled by Republicans, trying to pass a staggering 250 laws that would restrict voting. We have the knock-on effects of the Pandemic Recession which have yet to fully drop on us (market crash? Housing bubble popping? Student loan crisis?). Oh yeah, toss into that basket accelerating climate change provoking truly catastrophic weather events.

Most worrying, we have a very large percentage of Americans –30-40-50%-- who have simply given up on democracy and rule of law and who are more than ready to support an authoritarian regime.  I will repeat what I posited a month ago: we are currently one election away from disbanding democratic rule.

In short, we are in an extreme and historic existential crisis as a nation, now filled with millions of Americans who are confronted with their own private existential crisis that reveals itself in heightened suicides, opioid addiction, overflowing and stretched food banks, fading belief in democratic institutions and growing surrender to crackpot conspiracy theories that serve as a balm for confused and tortured souls.

Much of the Democratic base understands this, fortunately.  Unfortunately, much of the Leadership dwells in the comfy confines of Capitol Hill and while I will give some the benefit of the doubt that they are truly committed to public service, most are just too compromised, too far from the daily experience of ordinary people, to fully grasp the massive dimensions of our critical moment.

Making improvements, working for slow incremental change, compromising to get an even break on what you want, appealing to “bi-partisanship” and everything that goes with that is not adequate for what we face. 

Under these circumstances we need a Democratic Party that is bold and adventurous and militant, not passive, weak and conciliatory. We need the sort of dramatic proposals and the extended reach of the sort that Trump did not hesitate to use to wreck the system in order to rescue and improve it.

I am hoping, with a great quotient of skepticism, that Biden and Schumer are playing the long game; I hope they are playing rope-a-dope, freely allowing the Republicans to kill everything put on the table so that ALL Democrats will eventually agree there is no other solution than striking the filibuster.

That hope in my heart runs counter to the doubts in my head. And even if it’s true, and there is a third dimension to the Dem strategy I cannot see here, it still seems a highly treacherous course that recommends more immediate and decisive action so that we do not wind up under total minority rule. ++

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