One again Congressional Republicans are finding that a highly-hyped piece of legislation that dominated news cycles, talk radio, weblogs and political discussion has failed with a familiar name being associated with the failure: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
Pundits often note that Dr. Frist isn’t running for re-election because he wants to run for President in 2008. If so, he is certainly using a unique strategy to prepare a record to present to GOP voters — and non-Republican voters he hopes to woo if he gets the nomination. The New York Times:
Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked legislation tying the first minimum wage increase in almost a decade to a decrease in the federal estate tax, denying Republicans a legislative victory as lawmakers head into a crucial month of campaigning before the November elections.
Republican backers of the measure, dubbed the trifecta for its three chief elements, fell 4 votes short of the 60 needed to cut off debate. Democrats had argued that it was a bad bargain to exchange a $2.10 wage increase for struggling workers for a costly tax cut for the country’s wealthiest families.
“This trifecta is a high-stakes gamble with America’s future,� said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat. “This is the worst special-interest bill I have seen in my time in Congress.�
So it’s clear the partisan lines were drawn here partially because past minimum wage increases didn’t come with so major conditions super-glued onto them.
The bottom line though, is it is generally assumed that to get a law passed a skillful Majority Leader carefully lines up and counts the votes, “twists arms” or does whatever it takes to get vital pieces of legislation through. That clearly didn’t happen here:
Scrambling to complete its business and join the House in an August recess, the Senate also approved and sent to the president a major overhaul of pension law as Republicans sought to record some last-minute accomplishments.
But the failure of the bill linking the wage increase and the tax cut was a significant defeat for Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader entering his last months in the post. Mr. Frist had hoped to steer the measure through the Senate, partly with the help of an accompanying series of tax incentives and federal aid to woo lawmakers.
Mr. Frist and his allies in business viewed the wage increase, stretched over three years, as an acceptable trade-off for a permanent reduction in the estate tax and $38 billion in tax breaks and federal aid that constituted the third part of the measure. But they could not overcome intense opposition from Democrats and organized labor.
How bad was it? The Washington Post reports that “The official Senate tally was 56 to 42 in favor of proceeding to a vote on the wage-and-tax bill, short of the 60 required. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) supported the package but switched his vote — reducing the final number to 56 from 57 — to enable him to seek a reconsideration later.”
So who will workers blame? Here’s one view (the Times again):
Republicans said Democrats were choosing partisanship over policy and were stalling the measure to allow them to attack the record of the Republican-led Congress.
“It is an excuse to make it a do-nothing Congress,� Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said. “And we are turning our back on the middle-class and poor people in this country who depend on the minimum wage and death-tax relief.�
Republicans said the legislation represented the best opportunity to advance an increase in the minimum wage that Democrats have been advocating for years, and some predicted the Democratic opposition could boomerang. Republicans said the proposal balanced the interests of both workers and employers.
But is that the case?
In fact, the bill came under intense fire for having a provision that would essentially slice the income of thousands of servers — so the minimum wage would be RAISED but income REDUCED for some workers. The Los Angeles Times:
But as Democrats muster opposition to a bill they say unfairly links the wage hike to a costly cut in the estate tax, they are focusing on one sentence in the 183-page bill that could mean pay cuts of $3 an hour or more for bartenders, food servers and others who rely on tips to supplement their wages.
“It’s a devastating proposal,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who was among a group of leading Democrats who have stepped up their campaign to scuttle the bill.
Two independent analyses of the bill released Wednesday also suggested that the provision could threaten the wages of thousands of tipped employees.
The provision was crafted by Republicans in response to complaints from restaurateurs, who said it was unfair to require them to pay the full minimum wage to employees who also receive tips.
In most states, minimum-wage employees who receive tips can be paid less than those who do not, if they make up the difference with gratuities. Under current federal law, the minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13 an hour, compared with $5.15 an hour for non-tipped workers.
California and six other states do not have a lower minimum wage for workers who receive tips, however. Current California law sets the minimum wage for all workers at $6.75 an hour.
That would change if the bill currently before the Senate passes, according to Democratic critics and the new analyses….
….In California alone, as many as 638,000 employees might be affected by the change, according to a Democratic analysis of the bill prepared for the Senate Committee on Labor, Health, Education and Pensions.
Other states that could be affected include Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, which also do not set a minimum wage for tipped employees.
If politics is anticipating or preparing for worst-case scenarios, the question is: isn’t the GOP going to suffer among the very workers it was seemingly trying to win over (people who get minimum wage) because although it pressed for a minimum wage increase there was a huge amount of publicity about it being linked to a massive estate tax reduction PLUS a reduction in actual income for some workers?
If the bill had passed, you can just imagine the follow-up news stories that would have appeared in both print and broadcast media….right before election time…showing people whose incomes were reduced by the new law.
The Post’s report makes it clear that Frist felt he had set a political trap for the Democrats, which was crafty — except the Democrats didn’t take the bait as anticipated:
Frist agreed to the [GOP-House originated] deal, hoping that several Democrats could not resist a chance to raise the minimum wage, in three phases, to $7.25 an hour from the current $5.15. The bill would also have exempted from taxation all estates worth as much as $5 million — or $10 million for a married couple — and applied a 15 percent tax rate to inheritances above that threshold and up to $25 million. The value of estates exceeding $25 million would have been taxed at 30 percent….
…GOP senators had practically dared Democrats to vote against the package with the minimum-wage increase. All but four Senate Democrats took the dare, heeding Reid’s plea to deny Frist a victory as lawmakers go home to campaign. Republicans predicted that Democrats will regret their decision.
At best, Frist has proven to be a sloppy Majority Leader who on several matters hasn’t had enough influence to piece together winning vote coalitions. He also didn’t seemingly do enough homework to anticipate possible opposition lines of attack — or to count votes before he called for them. The bill’s blockage in an election year also illustrates a failure to realize that if he had come up with a bill that truly got significant Democratic support the end result would be to take some of the edge of longstanding perceptions held by some working Americans that Republicans largely do the bidding of the wealthy.
At worst, Frist has capped a career as Majority Leader that political scientists will likely say made him one of the most ineffective Majority Leaders in modern political history.
At the least, his judgment about when to press for a vote has been fatally, almost shockingly flawed.
So, in the end, instead of Republicans going into the election with a product-of-compromise minimum-wage hike that would ease deeply-rooted images of the GOP among many workers, the GOP (unless a new bill passes) will go into the election charging that the Democrats were to blame, following a sea of publicity about the various conditions attached to their bill. The Democrats will in turn argue that GOP was trying to put one over on working Americans and reward its donors.
Which argument do you think is more likely to sway more working voters?
Can a bill still pass? Possibly. But on the next vote, Frist will probably be better prepared. In the meantime, the GOP is likely to come out of this more damaged among voters they seek to win over than the Democrats.
UPDATE: This from Reuters:
Frist, a possible 2008 Republican presidential candidate, countered that the failed package was “important to millions of hard working Americans.” And he said that the “death tax” has meant that “90 percent of family businesses do not survive that third generation” because they either cannot afford the steep taxes or the expensive procedures to find legal tax shelters.
The Heretik has a take on this too.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.