Dole Blocks Vote on Raising Minimum Wage

Through some deft parliamentary maneuvering, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) avoided what could have been a politically awkward vote on increasing the minimum wage Tuesday, despite the best efforts of the Democratic minority to force the Senate to go on record.

For a few hours during the afternoon, it looked as if the Democrats, with the help of some apparent GOP parliamentary blunders, had found a way to pressure Dole into a vote on one of Democrats’ highest election year priorities, an increase in the minimum wage from $4.35 to $5.15 in two steps over the next two years.

In the end, however, the vote was avoided when Republicans joined Democrats in a 97-0 procedural vote that kept the issue alive while setting it aside.

But Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) filed for another vote Thursday. That effort is expected to fail, but Daschle and other Democrats declared their determination to continue hammering on the issue.

“This is one of the opening salvos of the economic debate that we ought to be having in this country,” Daschle said.

The issue was engulfed in presidential politics and showed a downside to Dole’s strategy of running his campaign from the Capitol. The rules of the Senate allow each senator great power to introduce votes on practically any issue, despite the wishes of the majority leader.

“The day that Bob Dole locks up the Republican nomination he locks out working families,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told reporters in the press gallery.

The vote was potentially embarrassing for Dole because increasing the minimum wage is widely popular with the public. An NBC poll taken after President Clinton spoke out for a minimum wage hike in his State of the Union address showed that 78% of those surveyed favored the increase.

Dole has supported increases in the minimum wage in the past. In 1989, the last time Congress voted to increase the minimum wage, Dole said that “I never thought the Republican Party should stand for squeezing every last nickel from the minimum wage,” according to the Congressional Quarterly Almanac.

But on Tuesday, Dole called a minimum wage increase “very controversial” and said it would amount to an unfunded mandate that would cost low-income Americans, especially young blacks, their jobs.

In a floor speech, Dole fired back at Democrats, saying that they had a chance to increase the minimum wage during the first two years of the Clinton administration, when Democrats had majorities in both houses, but failed to do so.

“The Democrats didn’t bring it up, and they controlled everything,” Dole said.

But, Kennedy said, Democrats at the time were hoping to pass far-reaching health care reform, which would have amounted to a wage increase for many low-income workers.