Sanders confident of raising minimum wage as part of $1.9tn Covid package

Bernie Sanders said on Saturday he was confident Senate Democrats will be able to raise the US minimum wage to $15, a step firmly opposed by Republicans but a key part of the Biden administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package.

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In a statement, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats and chairs the Senate budget committee said he was “very proud of the strong arguments our legal team is making to the parliamentarian that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not ‘incidental’ to the federal budget and is permissible under the rules of reconciliation”.

Reconciliation allows legislators to bypass the 60-vote majority needed for most Senate legislation, for items linked to spending and taxation. When Donald Trump held the White House, Republicans used it to force through tax cuts. Under Barack Obama, Democrats used it to help pass the Affordable Care Act.

Sanders is championing moves to more than double the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, its level since 2009, over a five-year period. The move is a key part of the Biden coronavirus relief package, meant to tackle the devastating impact of a pandemic in which nearly 500,000 have died and unemployment has rocketed.

“Half of our workers are living paycheck to paycheck and millions of people are working for starvation wages,” Sanders wrote on Twitter on Friday. “We need the minimum wage to be a living wage and that’s why we’re going to raise it to $15 an hour.”

Public opinion is heavily in favour of the rise but Republicans are ranged against it, arguing that it would damage small businesses. Sanders counters that the gradual rise over five years should allay such concerns.

The Vermont senator is an experienced operator. After a coordinated if symbolic Republican move against the wage rise earlier this month, one Sanders staffer said: “This isn’t Bernie’s first rodeo … we can still try to pass minimum wage through the reconciliation bill.”

In his statement on Saturday, Sanders referred to two Republican priorities under Trump which could not reach 60 votes but which were pursued through reconciliation.

“The [Congressional Budget Office] has found that the $15 minimum wage has a much greater impact on the federal budget than opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drilling and repealing the [ACA] individual mandate penalties,” he said, “two provisions that the parliamentarian advised did not violate the Byrd rule when Republicans controlled the Senate.”

The Byrd rule is named for Robert Byrd, a long-serving Democratic senator from West Virginia who died in 2010. According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, it “allows senators to block provisions of reconciliation bills that are ‘extraneous’ to reconciliation’s basic purpose of implementing budget changes”.

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is the first woman to interpret and manage the rules of Senate procedure. She must decide if a minimum wage raise can be pursued through reconciliation.

On Saturday, Sanders said he was confident McDonough would do so next week.