“There’s just been this ratcheting up of consciousness about the crisis of low wages, and that has really fueled a lot of the activism at the local level," said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group pushing to raise the minimum wage. "Fight for 15" rallies and President Obama's two-year campaign haven't moved the Republicans running Congress, but they have had an impact across the country. Corporate America has begun to respond as well, as Wal-Mart and McDonalds have each announced plans to increase pay for their employees.

It's not unusual for Congress to lag behind cities and states in boosting the minimum wage, at least since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1981, when lawmakers stopped enacting increases at semi-regular intervals. Still, Owens said the grassroots activism on the minimum wage is more intense now than at any time since she began working on the issue 20 years ago. Part of the movement's success on the state and local level, according to several advocates I interviewed, is due to a change in perception. Whereas people once associated minimum-wage jobs with high school and college students looking to earn a little extra spending money, the advocacy during the economic recovery has spotlighted the millions of adults who are earning paltry pay for full-time jobs. "You have people working full-time who are still living in poverty," said Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the chief sponsor of the $12 proposal in the House. "Raising the minimum wage will address that." About 37.7 million workers would benefit from the higher wage floor, and just 11 percent would be teenagers, said David Cooper, who co-authored a study of the legislation for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

If nothing else, the wave of minimum-wage increases at the state and local levels has pushed Democrats in Congress to be bolder in their demands. When President Obama made the minimum wage a centerpiece of his State of the Union address in 2013, he called for the new standard to be $9 an hour. A few months later, Democrats Tom Harkin and George Miller (both since retired) introduced legislation raising it to $10.10. Now the goal is up to $12, phased in over five years. While economists acknowledge that a steep increase could stifle job-creation, liberal analysts argued that when adjusted for inflation, a $12 floor in 2020 would merely bring the minimum wage in line with where it was in 1968, when it hit its peak relative to the broader economy. Unlike earlier proposals, the Murray-Scott bill would also raise the minimum wage for tipped workers (waiters and waitresses, for example), and it would be indexed to the median wage nationally, as opposed to inflation measured by consumer prices.

Then again, do the details really matter if the bill doesn't stand a chance? In the House, Speaker John Boehner can't even get Republicans to act on issues he supports (See: Immigration reform). And as the son of a barkeep who once ran his own small business, Boehner is passionately and personally opposed to lifting the minimum wage. (He once said he'd rather commit suicide than vote for a straight-up increase, although that was nearly 20 years ago.) The best hope that Democrats have is either getting the proposal attached to a broader package that includes a GOP priority, or bringing enough pressure to bear that rank-and-file Republicans begin breaking from the leadership—a strategy they tried unsuccessfully with immigration. "My hunch is that this will be a 2016 vote, one way or the other," Owens said. Given the campaigns underway outside Washington, another half-dozen states could increase their minimum wages by then, leaving the feds farther and farther behind.

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