Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman discusses the Democrats’ latest blow in their efforts trying to increase the minimum wage in the relief bill, and the timeline of when we could see a minimum wage increase.

Video Transcript

- All right, we also have to talk about what's going on in Washington here because it looks like the House is about to sign the coronavirus relief package. But it won't include something that many Democrats been pushing for, and that's an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Our Rick Newman has been tracking this is, as, of course, what's been going on with the bill generally, and it seems like, what, Rick, this is sort of a procedural issue, right, that the parliamentarian of the Senate, if I have this right, said that this could not be included in budget reconciliation. Can-- can you translate what all this means?

RICK NEWMAN: Yep. This gets back to the arcane rules of the Senate where legislation goes to die. The-- the minimum wage provision actually is in the House version. It will probably stay there. But the Senate is not going to be able to approve that measure because of this ruling from the Senate parliamentarian yesterday. So what she said was-- and I should add, this is not a surprise. I mean, we all kind of saw this coming.

But in order to pass a bill in the Senate under the reconciliation rules, which means you get around the filibuster-- and you can do it with just a simple majority of 51 votes-- the measure has to apply either to taxation or expenditure. It has to directly affect the federal budget, and the minimum wage provision would-- would tell companies, you have to pay workers a minimum wage that would get up to $15 in a few years. But that's neither a tax nor an expenditure, so for that reason it cannot-- it doesn't apply under the reconciliation rules.

Now, the Democrats who control the Senate-- they could ignore this. They could change the rules, but they seem unlikely to do that. So what that means is there probably is not going to be a minimum wage increase in this particular bill. They would have to do it on a standalone basis. They probably would have to get at least 10 Republicans to go along with them, which I think means there's no chance we're going to see a $15 minimum wage increase this year.

- And Rick, with the stimulus package, what is the timeline looking like right now for getting this passed? Because Congress does have that mid-March cliff for federal unemployment benefits to contend with, and it doesn't look like they'll actually be able to meet that deadline.

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, I think so. What probably is going to happen-- so this House bill will go to the Senate. The Senate will develop its own bill. It could be a smaller price tag, for example. Instead of $1.9 trillion, it could be maybe $1.7 trillion, $1.5 trillion. So they'll work that out through the conference process.

And then I think this bill, without the minimum wage and perhaps with a slightly smaller price tag but a pretty sizable bill nonetheless, probably will pass and get signed by President Biden in March. And they're already drafting the next bill, which is going to be a big infrastructure package coming either in the-- in the summer or in the fall. So they're going to-- I think they're going to get this done within a couple of weeks.

- Long-awaited infrastructure as well. We'll see what happens with that. Look forward to maybe that finally coming to fruition. Rick Newman, thank you so much. Appreciate it.