Politics & Power Quote by Russ Carnahan

A politician’s favorite move is to make “time” do the heavy lifting, and Russ Carnahan does it twice. “It is time” isn’t an argument so much as a drumbeat: a way to turn a policy preference into a moral deadline. The line is built to sound inevitable, like Congress is merely catching up to reality rather than choosing among trade-offs.

The pairing of “the American people and minimum-wage workers” is the tell. Minimum-wage workers are obviously part of the American people, but separating them rhetorically does two jobs at once: it enlarges the coalition (“everyone wants this”) while spotlighting a sympathetic subgroup (“and especially them”). It’s a classic populist two-step that frames opposition as not just disagreeing on economics, but ignoring a public that has already spoken. “Listened” is a soft verb with a sharp accusation inside it: you haven’t been paying attention; you’ve been listening to someone else.

Then comes the pivot from feeling to force: “it is time that we act.” That “we” is strategically ambiguous. It pretends to implicate the whole institution (Congress as a collective) while also positioning the speaker on the side of motion and urgency, leaving critics stranded in the posture of delay. The subtext is less about the minimum wage itself than about legitimacy: Carnahan is claiming the democratic high ground, casting a wage increase as the baseline of responsiveness.

Contextually, it fits the post-recession era when wage stagnation and inequality were becoming bipartisan talking points, and “do-nothing Congress” was a potent charge. The sentence is engineered for a floor speech and a clip: short, moralized, and easy to rally behind.