FEE responds to the Senate's inaction yesterday thusly:

Minimum Wage Hits Senate Impasse
1/25/2007
"Senate Republicans rejected an effort by Democrats to pass minimum-wage legislation without breaks for small businesses on Wednesday, setting the stage for a potential impasse with the House, where lawmakers are demanding a clean bill." (New York Times, Thursday)

Blessed gridlock.

FEE Timely Classic
"Decency Requires a Minimum-Wage Law? It Just Ain't So!" by Aeon J. Skoble

I added the emphasis. Indeed. Glad to have gridlock back, it's been too long.

Here's the conclusion of the Skoble piece:

The bulk of [Republican Senator Douglas] MacKinnon's argument [in 2003]commits what logicians call the "ad misericordiam" fallacy: he expounds on the fact that he himself used to be poor, that it is terrible to live in poverty, that it is hard for the working poor to make ends meet, that many poor people are poor from birth, and that the poor are people too, equally deserving of dignity. All the things he says on these subjects are true. But they don't constitute a refutation of the economic principle explained above. (It is as if one tried to refute the law of gravity by describing how awful it feels when a piano falls on one’s head: it is indeed awful, but that's what falling pianos do.) And they don't address the real suffering of the real people who will be made worse off by these misguided attempts to help people.

It's a great, short article. RTWT.