The same Senate Republicans who passed tax breaks for billionaires with record speed are now threatening a filibuster to prevent an increase in the federal minimum wage. On Wednesday, only 54 Senators voted to cut off debate over the long overdue minimum wage hike, six short of the 60 votes needed. Nearly all Republican Senators are opposing the stand-alone bill, joining President Bush in assuming that they can force Democrats to link the wage hike to new tax breaks for business. Democrats can agree to the tax breaks to ensure the paltry $5.15 minimum wage is increased, or draw a line in the sand and let Americans know that Republicans are to blame for holding up passage. In light of how President Clinton and fellow Democrats allowed the last minimum wage hike in 1996 to be linked to a bevy of special interest tax cuts, Democrats must learn from this mistake and stay firm.

Although as many as 80 House Republicans backed a stand-alone minimum wage hike from $5.15 to $7.25 over two years, Republican Senators believe they can get credit for enacting the increase while also giving tax breaks to business. Their plan is to prevent an up or down vote on the wage hike, forcing Democrats to accept new tax breaks as the price of passage.

It’s a smart strategy. Should Democrats go along, Republicans can claim in 2008 that they backed the minimum wage hike, and few voters are likely to recall their opposition to a stand-alone bill.

That’s what happened the last time the minimum wage was increased in 1996. Newt Gingrich controlled the House at the time and insisted on tying a wage hike to corporate tax breaks. The resulting law raising the wage from $4.25 to $5.15 was even titled the Small Business Job Protection Act, and it enabled Republican House members to argue in their re-election campaigns that they had fought to increase the minimum wage while concealing the huge windfall for corporations.

That’s why Democrats must not again give Republicans the opportunity to benefit from obstructionism.

Major news web sites on January 24 and 25 gave little attention to the Republicans’ opposition to the wage hike. As a new vote occurs next week, the vast majority of voters likely know more about Republican support for the wage hike in the House than the Party’s stopping the bill in the Senate.

This means that Democrats must call the Republicans bluff and let them continue voting to stop low-income Americans from earning only $5.15 an hour. Keep the Senate in session for days if necessary, so even apolitical Americans will become aware of the Republicans all-out effort to keep working families in poverty.

San Francisco had a clear analogy to the Republicans example back in 2001, when our Board of Supervisors was asked to approve a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the city’s downtown corporations to invalidate the city’s business tax.

Accepting the advice of the City Attorney, the Supes voted to pay tens of millions of dollars in settling the case. The majority saw this as prudent, fearing that an adverse Court of Appeal ruling would cost San Francisco much more.

But the settlement prevented most San Francisco taxpayers from learning about the massive looting of the city’s treasury by the Hearst Corporation (owner of the SF Chronicle) and other plaintiffs in the case. In contrast, had the Court of Appeal ultimately ruled again the city, banner headlines about “City owes Corporations Million$” would have created a public backlash against the corporations bringing the suit.

None of the corporations filing the suit wanted to be publicly identified with causing hikes in Muni fares, closures of recreation centers, reduction in AIDS funding and cuts in children’s programs. And thanks to the settlement, the vast majority of San Franciscans do not associate these corporations with such actions.

In fact, most do not even recall the lawsuit that has taken over $200 million from the city’s treasury.

A similar result will occur if Senate Democrats quickly cave in on the stand-alone minimum wage hike. Every single Republican will be able to claim during the 2008 campaign season that they supported an increased minimum wage, even when virtually all Republican Senators only did so when it was teamed with a tax cut.

Even worse, it now appears likely that at least some Republican House members voted for the stand-alone bill because they knew their Senate allies would force a different deal. These members can say they voted for the stand-alone bill, while telling their business allies that they only did so knowing it would be stopped in the Senate.

In the previous session of Congress, Democrats gave up the right to filibuster certain judicial nominees, which resulted in conservative Janice Brown winning confirmation to the influential DC Court of Appeals. Now Jim Webb’s Party needs to prove it has the courage he has, which means calling Republicans bluff on its plan to prevent a vote on the wage hike.

In Frank Capra’s classic film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart engaged in an heroic filibuster to prevent a corrupt land deal. The filibuster rules have since changed, so that it would now have to be proponents of the wage hike controlling the Senate debate while Republicans would only have to come forward if a call for a vote was made.

Some have suggested that such a scene would cause Democrats to be blamed for bringing the Senate's business to a halt. But there's nothing wrong with bringing business to a halt over such a critical cause, and the American people are not going to side with Republicans on the minimum wage issue.

Update: Ted Kennedy understands the right strategy. He told Senate Republicans on Friday:

"Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this? Why don’t you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"


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