| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill is arriving at the Senate floor, and it appears that Democrats have the votes. Many pundits (and Republicans, when they're not distracted by the Muppets and Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss) have put a lot of emphasis on the decision Democrats have made to pass the bill through the reconciliation process, which allows a simple majority to avoid filibusters that can stymie legislation commanding fewer than 60 votes. But there's no real mystery here. Assuming that (barely) all of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's ducks are in a row, all 50 Democratic senators are ready to vote for the bill, and Vice President Kamala Harris has the tie-breaker to get the job done. Parties that have the votes rarely make concessions to get additional, unnecessary votes! Bipartisan compromise happens when it's needed, not for its own sake. Republicans never sketched out a realistic path to passage, anyway. Yes, it's possible that Democrats could have brought a handful of GOP senators on board had they been willing to settle for a smaller bill. But such a bill might have lost more House Democrats than it would have gained in House Republicans, who tend to be a lot less open to cutting deals than those in the other chamber. Note, too, that winning three Senate Republicans for the recovery bill in 2009 bought President Barack Obama and the Democrats exactly zero bipartisanship points with the media or the public; the same would have been true now had a smaller bill passed 53-47 instead of the likely 51-50 outcome. Meanwhile, the real headline here — again, assuming that the bill passes — is that this will be a major win on substance for the Democrats. Much of the money in it is short-term relief: another round of direct checks, an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, money to hard-hit businesses and state and local governments, and spending on fighting the coronavirus. But even with an increase in the minimum wage stripped out, there are still significant liberal gains on Obamacare and other health-care policy items, on direct support to fight poverty, and in other areas. There's probably a good case to be made that this bill alone will be a more significant policy shift towards liberal preferences than the shift in the other direction accomplished by the Republican-majority Congress in the first two years of the Donald Trump presidency. What of the minimum wage increase? Senator Bernie Sanders is apparently going to offer the increase to $15 as an amendment; it is almost certainly going to fail given the opposition of moderate Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and perhaps Kyrsten Sinema and the unanimous opposition of the Republicans. Indeed, while many activists have been focused on the various obscure Senate procedures involved, the core problem for advocates of $15 is that they don't have a simple majority in the current Senate — their problem is with voters in Maine and North Carolina who rejected Democratic challengers to vulnerable Republican incumbents in November (and, to be fair, with the malapportionment of the Senate) and not with Senate rules. Nor does it help to complain about Manchin. Democrats simply don't have much leverage over him on this. That doesn't mean that a significant minimum-wage hike is impossible. Raising the minimum wage polls extremely well, and Manchin does support a smaller increase. Even a handful of Republicans have offered up minimum-wage proposals. The best plan here is almost certainly for Democrats to begin by reaching a deal that can get at least 50 votes. After that, they would have some options. Perhaps they could structure it to allow it to pass using majority-rules procedures. Or perhaps they can bring it to the Senate floor and leave it there for a while, daring Republicans to defeat it by filibuster rather than reaching a compromise — or to simply drop their filibuster and allow a final vote. There's no guarantee they can win that fight, but they might, and who knows? Perhaps Manchin, if he was on board with the bill, might start getting frustrated with Republican use of the filibuster after all. 1. Christopher Sebastian Parker and Rachel M. Blum at the Monkey Cage on Trump's strongest supporters. 2. Norm Ornstein on some filibuster reform ideas that might appeal to pro-filibuster Democrats. 3. Fred Kaplan on Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Peter R. Orszag on budget deficits and climate. 5. And Quinta Jurecic and Bryce Klehm on the Trump financial records cases. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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