WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic leaders have powerful momentum on their side as Congress prepares for initial ballots on the party’s $ 1.9 trillion COVID-19 emergency: Would a Democrat dare cast the vote that sinks new President Joe Biden’s initiative?
The Democrats’ wafer-thin House majority of 10 votes leaves little room for apostasy in the face of solid Republican opposition, and they have none in a 50-50 Senate that they control only with Vice President Kamala Harris’s binding vote. Internal democratic disputes persist over issues such as raising the minimum wage, how much aid is going to the struggling state and local governments, and whether emergency unemployment benefits should be extended for an extra month.
But now that the House Budget Committee plans to approve the 591-page package on Monday, Democrats across the spectrum of the party are showing little evidence that they are willing to embarrass Biden with a flashy defeat a month after his presidency. .
Such a setback would both Biden and the new Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y. It could also injure Democrats in general congress by risking repercussions in the 2022 election if they fail to unite effectively against apparent enemies like the pandemic and the frozen economy.
“You think very seriously before casting a decisive vote against the legislative agenda of your own party president,” said Ian Russell, a longtime Democratic adviser. But he warned that lawmakers must decide at home “how their vote will go.”
The problem that has sparked the deepest divisions is a drive, largely by progressives, to raise the federal minimum wage to $ 15 an hour over five years. The current minimum of $ 7.25 went into effect in 2009.
“It was # 1 priority for progressives,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., President of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview last week. “This is something we’ve run on and something we’ve promised the American people.”
A blanket bill, including the minimum wage increase, is expected to evacuate the House, and likely the Senate. But the fate of the minimum wage increase is shaky in the Senate, where Joe Manchin of West Virginia, arguably the chamber’s most conservative Democrat, has said the $ 15 target is too expensive.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., Has suggested she might be against it too. She said Democrats should not bring it to the aisle using special rules that would allow them to avoid a Republican filibuster, which would require an unreachable 60 votes to win.
Manchin’s office did not make him available for an interview. Earlier this month, he told The Hill, a political publication, that $ 11 an hour would be “responsible and reasonable.”
Even more ominously, the Senate MP is expected to decide shortly whether the bill’s minimum wage provision should be scrapped. Under accelerated procedures used by Democrats, items that are not primarily budget related cannot be included, and it is unclear whether Democrats would have the votes to overturn such a decision.
But even in a Congress where virtually every Democratic vote is needed, few threaten to overturn the entire law openly unless they get their way.
Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budgets Committee, I-Vt., The main sponsor of his chamber’s minimum wage, said Democrats should “act courageously” and approve a package containing the minimum wage increase. He answered indirectly when asked if he was willing to compromise to take the plan into account in the overall account.
“Every Democrat understands that at this point in history, this unprecedented moment of pain and suffering for working families, it is imperative that we support the President, do what the American people want and pass on that package,” said he in an interview.
Moderate Representative Brad Schneider, D-Ill., Also expressed an aversion to stubborn demands. The road to success is “to strive as hard as you can to get as much as you want now, without compromising your principles, and knowing that tomorrow is another day,” said Schneider, a leader of the New Democrat Coalition. a group of nearly 100 moderate House Democrats.
Republicans say proposal is too expensive, does not target people most in need, does not stimulate enough schools to reopen and is a partisan Democratic power game to ignore the GOP.
The bill would bring in one-time payments of $ 1,400 to millions of low- and middle-income people, increase child tax credits that can be paid upfront and monthly, and provide additional weekly federal unemployment benefits of $ 400 through August. It would also bring in hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments, shuttered schools, COVID-19 vaccines and testing, and struggling airlines, restaurants and other businesses.
History has rich examples of lawmakers facing crucial decisions about whether or not to loyally support the priorities of their party presidents, with mixed results.
In 2017, there were three GOP dropouts – most famously a thumbs down after midnight by now-deceased Senator John McCain, R-Ariz. – Overruled then President Donald Trump’s trademark to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the Obama era. McCain’s vote sparked endless animosity from Trump. Of the other two, Maine became Sen. Susan Collins reelected last year and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski will be re-elected in 2022.
In 1993, new president Bill Clinton’s $ 500 billion deficit reduction plan with a single vote approved the House after freshman Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky agreed to support it. Mezvinsky, who had previously criticized the measure for insufficient spending cuts, voted “yes” after Clinton asked for her support during a phone call she recorded in the House wardrobe during the vote.
“I told him I knew how important it was and that I didn’t want to drop it, but I said I was just going to be the casting vote,” she recalled in an interview this week. She said she also said to him, “If I pull you over the top, you’ll lose this chair.”
Both scenarios took place.
The package passed 218-216, saved by its casting vote. And the legislature, whose last name is now Margolies after divorce, lost her reelection two years later from what was a tough GOP district in the Philadelphia suburbs.
She never returned to Congress. But one of her children, Marc Mezvinsky, later married Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea.