Minimum wage hike faces steep hill in Congress

Protesting fast-food workers demonstrate outside a McDonald's restaurant in New York. (AP Photo/File)

Unless President Obama is somehow able to borrow from Harry Truman’s playbook, Congress is more likely to take on issues such as immigration and government funding instead of tackling the idea of raising the minimum wage when its members return from their summer break early next week.

Despite recent protests, nationwide tweets, talk shows, speeches by the president and plenty of news coverage, no votes on the issue of the minimum wage are scheduled in Congress in the near future. Morever, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 has not yet had a hearing in the House this year. Six Democrats joined every Republican representative in opposition to raising the minimum wage when Democrats offered it up during a procedural fight over an unrelated House bill in March. That vote tally was 223-184.