UMRA Used to Kill Minimum Wage Increase - In Congress - RegWatch

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Thursday, October 20, 2005

UMRA Used to Kill Minimum Wage Increase

Remember that sneak attack from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who snuck into the Senate budget resolution an amendment that altered the procedural requirements of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act? UMRA created a new point of order against any bill that would impose costs on state and local governments above a specific threshold, but the vote count required to overcome the point of order and allow a bill to move forward for a final vote was only a simple majority. Alexander changed that, for the Senate at least, by raising the vote count to a 60-vote supermajority.

As we explained at the time, Alexander’s gambit means that a relatively harmless procedural mechanism turned into an insurmountable roadblock to important protections for the public interest. Take, for example, new environmental protections, which typically either rely on state and local governments as partners in enforcement activities or call on the local governments to modify their own behaviors (as polluters, as managers of water systems, sewers, and waste facilities, etc.). Also at stake would be any improvements for workers, such as a real increase in the minimum wage, if the costs to states for applying new safeguards for their own employees reach $62 million or more. In fact, since UMRA became law, one of the few statutes ultimately enacted that met the UMRA threshold was the minimum wage increase from the mid-1990s.

Now, Alexander’s UMRA sneak attack has been used to defeat — what else? — a proposed increase in the minimum wage. In a replay of an earlier battle, Sen. Kennedy offered a proposal to raise the minimum wage (S. Amdt. 2063) while Sen. Enzi offered an alternative that purported to “offset” the increase with dangerous anti-regulatory measures (S. Amdt. 2115). The Kennedy amendment was killed when Sen. Bond raised the UMRA point of order against the bill, and the 60-vote supermajority requirement kicked in. The 47-51 vote to preserve the amendment against the UMRA point of order fell short of the 60 votes needed to sustain the measure.