As Vice President Kamala Harris begins sketching out her policy agenda as the presumptive Democratic nominee, one element isn’t being discussed: the arcane Senate procedures that could stop any bold action under a Harris presidency.
Three years ago, in her role as vice president and president of the Senate, Harris could have ignored some of those procedures and increased the federal minimum wage, but failed to do so. Now that she’s promising to raise the minimum wage and deliver other pro–working class concessions on the campaign trail, will she be willing to act differently?
While the Harris-Walz ticket has only just begun to flesh out its vague policy agenda, one of the few actions it’s vowed to take is to increase the federal minimum wage. Today employers are required to offer workers just $7.25 an hour.
“It is my promise to everyone here: when I am president we will continue our fight for working families of America,” Harris said in a recent speech, “including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
In 2021, a provision to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour was attached to a COVID-19 spending bill that passed through the House of Representatives. Once the bill reached the upper chamber, the legislation was stymied by the sixty-vote minimum needed to overcome a filibuster, a process used to block or prolong votes on a piece of legislation. To bypass the filibuster threat, Senate Democrats tried to use a convoluted process called “budget reconciliation” that allows bills addressing the federal budget to pass on a simple majority vote.
But the reconciliation process allows the Senate parliamentarian — an unelected official who oversees Senate…
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Auteur: Freddy Brewster
