On Monday, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren drew battle lines in the Senate’s consideration of Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery plan, urging Vice President Kamala Harris to restore the $15 minimum wage hike stripped from the bill by the Senate parliamentarian.
Sanders and Warren will almost certainly lose that fight. Even if Harris overruled the parliamentarian, progressive bêtes noires Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would withhold their approval from the final package, dooming passage in the evenly-split Senate.
But even in likely defeat, Sanders and Warren are sending a warning message to the Democratic Party: that progressives are uncomfortable at the growing list of President Biden’s first-month concessions. Sacrificing the $15 minimum wage without a firm promise to tackle progressive issues next risks turning that discomfort into fury.
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If Democrats hope to keep a coalition that includes Sanders on one end and Manchin on the other, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—and Biden—need to start treating progressives with the same white-glove service currently reserved for the party’s most conservative members. That starts with turning up the heat on Democrats’ two leading anti-progress holdouts.
“My personal view is that the idea that we have a Senate staffer, a high-ranking staffer, deciding whether 30 million Americans get a pay raise or not is nonsensical,” Sanders said. “We have got to make that decision, not a staffer.”
Harris should ignore the parliamentarian. Not only is it the right thing to do—no one elected the parliamentarian to determine what voters want in the recovery package—it would also be a powerful statement of Democratic principles. The parliamentarian’s opinion is an advisory one, with no legally binding power. Voters elected Democrats to show leadership in deciding whether that advice is worth taking.
The Democratic Party cared so deeply about the $15 minimum wage that it adopted the idea in its 2016 and 2020 party platforms. That makes Manchin and Sinema the ones out of touch, not Warren, Sanders, and the two-thirds of Americans who support raising the minimum wage beyond poverty level.
If Manchin and Sinema want to rob low-income and young workers of a living wage, let them stand up in front of the people and yank it from the recovery bill themselves instead of hiding behind archaic procedural games. More importantly, let Democratic legislators who still believe in the party platform and Biden’s own commitment to American workers vote on the record against any effort by Manchin and Sinema to block a $15 minimum wage.
Assuming Manchin and Sinema stick to their guns, progressives should make clear through direct action that they expect the Biden administration to honor its commitment to a $15 minimum wage through a standalone bill. That would give Manchin’s constituents, some of the poorest in the country, a chance to voice the anger that comes from making only $7.25 in a state where a single person with one child must make $28.70 per hour to meet the bare minimum standard of a living wage, according to an MIT study.
The sense of betrayal playing out in cities and towns across the country is mobilizing the progressive left in exactly the wrong way if Biden hopes for a productive and successful presidency. After wrapping itself in Fight for $15 stickers throughout the 2020 campaign cycle, the Democratic Party now faces activists who feel manipulated and abandoned at the exact moment when they have the tools necessary to deliver a clear victory to match their bold promise.
Schumer and Biden will need to act fast and purposefully if they intend to counter the growing progressive narrative that Biden’s waffling on foreign policy transparency, holding Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and now on the minimum wage bait-and-switched the movement in a particularly humiliating and public way. If Biden wants to win progressives back, he’ll need big action on core issues like criminal justice reform, voting rights, and a path to citizenship for our broken immigration system.
Fortunately for the White House, progressive lawmakers have already done much of the lifting in drafting and building coalitions around legislation such as H.R. 1, the For the People Act. All that’s missing is a firm commitment from Biden to fully commit to the fight.
When an idealized vision of “compromise” becomes the broader goal, to the extent of actually denying Americans in need of policies that would help them, Democrats stop being a party willing to unapologetically lead from their values. They become a party compromised by compromise, so fixated on gaining bipartisanship points no one is awarding and governing by broad consensus that the very values that make Democrats who they are become empty phrases no one reasonably expects lawmakers to stand behind.
Joe Biden considers his presidency a chance to enact great moral change similar to that promised by the late Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s bust sits feet from Biden in the Oval Office. But there is no resemblance in today’s quick-folding Democrats to the often fractious moral courage Kennedy championed. Kennedy would have faced moderating influences in his administration, sure, but no one forced Biden to draw lofty comparisons between the left’s fallen hero and expectations for his own presidency.
That kind of sweeping Kennedyesque change requires facing the criticism that comes with progress and emerging from it a stronger party with a renewed commitment to enshrining progressive values in bold legislation and executive action. So far, Senators Sander and Warren courageously calling for the White House to represent the will of the people—not the will of an unelected parliamentarian—is the closest the modern Democratic Party has come to a Kennedy moment. Biden and foot-dragging Senate moderates should take notes.
Even if Manchin and Sinema get their way this time, Biden must make clear a $15 minimum wage bill is coming and his administration will forcefully support it. That means putting Biden in the venues where he does best—rallies with rank-and-file voters—and dropping those rallies in the most economically disadvantaged communities in Arizona and West Virginia. Biden can start repairing frayed relationships with the left, too, by putting as much public pressure on Manchin and Sinema to support progressive legislation as he currently puts on progressives like Sanders and Warren to grit their teeth and accept centrists’ misguided passion for pandemic austerity.
Biden spent so much of the past month coddling Manchin and Sinema that he’s forgotten the true source of Democrats’ majorities: voters, many of them progressive, and many more looking for concrete actions like the $15 minimum wage to better their lives. Legislators hold more immediate power, but disappointing the Democratic base without a plan to make amends invites electoral catastrophe in 2022. Rebuilding that broken trust starts by letting the American people know an unelected parliamentarian isn’t the spokesperson for Democratic values—and ends with the Democratic Party finally standing behind its platform and its values.
