Senate Nears Minimum Wage Vote
Republican Resistance Will Likely Delay, Not Derail Increase
The Senate is expected to move toward final passage this week on a bill that would increase in the minimum wage by $2.10 over two years -- the first such hike in a decade.
Raising the minimum wage, usually a rallying cry for more progressive or liberal Democrats, became an unlikely but effective campaign issue in the 2006 midterm elections that, along with voter frustration over the war in Iraq and perceived corruption on Capitol Hill, brought them back in control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years.
A similar bill to increase the minimum wage passed the House of Representatives earlier this month, but that measure did not include tax breaks for small businesses, which have been tacked onto the Senate bill so that it can gain enough votes to overcome Republican opposition.
House and Republican negotiators will have to hammer out a compromise bill before the wage hike can be sent to President Bush's desk. He has indicated he will sign the legislation as long as it still includes the small business tax breaks added in the Senate.
While the Senate bill is eventually expected to gain a majority of Republican and Democratic votes, arguments over the bill's substance have persisted for two weeks. Democrats have cried that Republicans have held it up to kill the measure with unrelated "poison pill" amendments that if successfully added to the bill would doom its passage. Other Democrats claimed that Republicans were simply staving off the inevitable to avoid the difficult debate on Iraq that Democrats have promised will follow passage of the minimum wage bill.
"Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this?" demanded an angry Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in a fiery speech on the Senate floor last Thursday.
"Why don't you just hold your amendments to other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try to raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy?"
