Around an hour ago, the House passed the minimum wage increase - all nicely packaged, I believe, with the provisions of the estate tax gutting bill HR 5638 which passed the House on June 22.

The omnibus bill is HR 5970, the Estate Tax and Extension of Tax Relief Act - which probably acronyms as EXTRA.

It's so new, the text isn't on THOMAS yet - so precisely what's in there I can't say.

The scores on today's vote: 230-180, R:196-21, D:34-158.

So - yet again - we have a GOP bill which only passes the House because of Dem votes.

Jonathan's hed was great as a stirring call to arms: House Dems Cannot Cave on the Minimum Wage

But, as a prediction - not so much.

The full roll of honor:

Abercrombie
Barrow
Bean
Berkley
Berry
Boren
Boswell
Boucher
Boyd
Brown (OH)
Case
Chandler
Cramer
Cuellar
Davis (TN)
Edwards
Ford
Gordon
Herseth
Jefferson
Marshall
Matheson
McIntyre
Melancon
Mollohan
Moore (KS)
Peterson (MN)
Rahall
Ross
Rush
Strickland
Tanner
Towns
Wu

Jonathan proposes that

if a vote is lost because a handful of Democratic Reps. care more about their own political viability than the party's chances to retake Congress, then those members should be stripped of their key committee assignments and left to rot away in the least popular and powerful committees.

We'll see.

Over to the Senate Dems, who will now give an impeccable demonstration of party unity in rejecting this grotesque measure.

After all, Uncle Harry says

The Senate has rejected fiscally irresponsible estate tax giveaways before and will reject them again. Blackmailing working families will not change that outcome.

And, as we know, one word from Uncle Harry...

Update [2006-7-29 3:8:34 by skeptic06]:

The last time the estate tax hit the Senate floor for a vote, it was to nix cloture on HR 8 (the bill which would have repealed the tax) by a tantalizing couple of votes. (Follow the HR 8 tag for the rather sordid details.)

And a Post piece fills in some blanks: apparently, there has been a dust-up between House and Senate GOP bigwigs the acrimony left from which may make passage of HR 5790 even more problematic than I'd thought.

(It's all bound up with HR 4, the Pension Protection Act, which passed the House yesterday evening.)

Sounds to me as though passing the minimum wage in the Senate may need a large bolt of Dem senators from the Reid ¡No pasarán! line as quoted above.

A large bolt of Dem senators...