Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is planning a Wednesday vote on increasing the minimum wage, and Senate Republicans plan to block the measure. Raising the minimum wage from its current poverty level of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $10.10 an hour is expected to draw the support of 54 out of 55 Democrats, with Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas having said in February that "I know $10.10 still isn’t a whole lot of money, but I think it’s too much, too fast."
But even with Pryor's vote, Republicans would still be able to filibuster the bill and, as President Barack Obama noted in his weekly address on Saturday, "Republicans in Congress don’t support raising the minimum wage. Some even want to get rid of it entirely." But outside of Congress, raising the minimum wage is incredibly popular; it's even pretty popular with Republican voters. That's why, as Obama said:
Republicans have voted more than 50 times to undermine or repeal health care for millions of Americans. They should vote at least once to raise the minimum wage for millions of working families.
That's what they should do. Instead, on Wednesday, we can expect them to vote against giving nearly 28 million people a raise.