"Doesn’t look like we can do it. I really want this in there but it just doesn't look like we can do it because of reconciliation…. We have to prepare for this not making it."
So said President Biden last week to a bipartisan group of governors and mayors about including a $15 minimum wage in the covid relief bill. Yet the reconciliation constraint isn't really the initiative's problem. Biden doesn't have the votes in the Senate, whether through reconciliation or on a separate bill. This straightforward, insurmountable obstacle will somehow be overlooked by a substantial segment of progressives, as they angrily eulogize the wage hike's demise.
In 2009 I wrote innumerable pieces centering on unrelenting progressive anger toward President Obama and his inability to secure a public option in the Affordable Care Act. The reason for that failure, I genteelly explained, was simple enough: He lacked the prerequisite votes in the Senate. Period.
Irrefutable bolts of soft reason, however, did nothing to quell the hardening progressive ire toward my explanation: No no, Obama, they cried, was a "neoliberal," a slacker, an uncommitted slayer of private-insurance evils. By late 2009, their stalwart refusal to accept the plain reality of insufficient numbers became so frustrating I finally wrote a piece encompassing nothing but five words, repeated some 100 times, forward, backward, vertically and diagonally: Obama doesn't have the votes. That unequivocal truth earned me yet angrier comments; I was "in" on the neoliberal fix. (Their ultimate answer to my accurate honesty and refusal to play the progressive shell game? Well, we just won't read you any longer.)
Some congressional Democrats and allied progressive groups are now urging Biden to support the wage hike's reconciliation route by overruling the Senate parliamentarian on what's allowable. That's fine and I'm all for the nuclear option of a simple majority vote on dissing the Byrd Rule, which would disallow the wage hike's reconciliation route.
What these Democrats and progressive allies choose to obscure, though, is precisely what progressives obscured 12 years ago: There just are not enough Senate votes — see, namely: Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) — to pass a covid relief bill enfolding a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour. (Nor, most likely, would there be the votes to overrule the Senate parliamentarian.)
But what, progressives concede the obvious? C'mon, man. In the end, they'll just blame President Biden for being a neoliberal, a slacker, an uncommitted slayer of capitalist oppressors.