Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s DC bureau chief, said Tuesday that another attempt by Democrats to pass a minimum wage increase through the budget reconciliation process would face long but not necessarily insurmountable odds.
Grim told Hill.TV’s “Rising” that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) could pursue the measure again, partly because Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough did not appear to set a precedent with regard to the previous attempt by Democrats, which was unsuccessful.
Schumer “has a couple of different rationales that he’s explaining to progressive groups. One is sort of like, ‘Hey, you never know. If there’s a 1 percent chance of it working, you might as well go for it,'” Grim said.
“More specifically, there are a couple of elements to it. One is that the parliamentarian’s advisory opinion was only one line long. And because it was one line it had the effect of kind of allowing senators and the media to refer to it as a ruling. But it’s not, it’s not a ruling,” he added.
Grim went on to say that a full analysis would be required to explain whether Senate Democrats could pass a wage increase through reconciliation.
“And in lieu of that analysis, she just gave this one line. So his reasoning is, ‘Well, she didn’t set any precedent there and so we can run the procedural traps again and this time perhaps find a way to make it fit with reconciliation.'”
Grim said that there has been some talk in the Senate of potentially tying the wage increase to a tax on companies that do not pay their workers $15 an hour as a way to persuade them to raise hourly pay.
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