Politics & Power Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

Stasis is the point here: nine years without a federal raise isn’t just a statistic, it’s an indictment of congressional paralysis. Boehlert frames the minimum wage as a basic maintenance issue the way you’d talk about crumbling bridges or a backlog of bills. The quiet provocation is that letting it sit isn’t neutral policy; it’s an active choice to let inflation do the dirty work of wage cuts while lawmakers keep their hands clean.

The second sentence is the pressure twist. By noting that 21 states will exceed the federal floor, he’s exploiting a political embarrassment: the “national” standard is no longer setting the standard. Federalism becomes a mirror held up to Washington. If states - including many with very different ideologies and economies - are willing to move, the implication is that Congress is not blocked by complexity so much as by convenience and captured priorities.

Context matters: this is the era when the federal minimum wage had been stuck at $5.15 since 1997, while living costs kept rising. In that climate, state-level hikes weren’t just experiments; they were workarounds for a broken national bargain. Boehlert’s intent is to reframe the debate away from abstract arguments about markets and toward credibility and legitimacy: a federal minimum wage that lags behind half the country starts to look less like prudence and more like abdication. The subtext is blunt: if Washington won’t act, America is already voting with its state legislatures.