The Biden administration is indicating it won’t play hardball to raise the minimum wage to $15. But despite significant setbacks, Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats in Congress like Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) are still pushing for the measure to be included in the current coronavirus relief package. If they succeed, the policy will improve millions of people’s lives. It will also be a political gift to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Last night, the Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled against the inclusion of the $15 wage hike in the package. It’s a procedural issue: she says the measure falls afoul of rules governing the budget reconciliation process which allows legislation to pass by 51 votes rather than the usual 60. (Raising the minimum wage has almost no Republican support, hence the urgency to push it through as part of the budget, with only Democratic votes.) As my Jacobin colleagues Andrew Perez and David Sirota have argued, Kamala Harris can and should use her authority as president of the Senate now to overrule MacDonough.

Even if this procedural problem can be resolved by Harris’s intervention, Biden is apparently also daunted by the opposition of conservative Democrats Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). In response to Manchin’s scroogey counteroffer to raise the minimum wage to $11 — since then, Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney have offered the even less livable alternative of $10 — Sanders told reporters this week, “We have tens of millions of workers working for starvation wages. It is an absolute national disgrace. Fifteen dollars is not a radical idea.”