Pelosi's First Hundred Hours and the 2007 Minimum Wage Increase

On January 4, 2007, a grandmother from San Francisco stood at the rostrum of the House of Representatives and took the gavel, and then did something no Speaker had done before: she invited the children in the chamber, her own grandchildren among them and the children of other members, to come up and stand around her. Nancy Pelosi had just become the first woman to hold the office in the 218 years since the House first met. The photograph of that moment, a crowd of small kids gathered around the Speaker's chair, is what most people remember. What fewer people remember is the second bill her new majority passed, six days later. It was two pages of plain text about a number that had not changed since 1997, and it would take nearly five months, a war-funding fight and a presidential veto before it became law.

In short: Democrats won the House in 2006 promising to pass six bills in their first hundred legislative hours, and a minimum wage increase was the most popular of them. The House passed it fast; the Senate slowed it, attached tax breaks, and the raise finally became law on May 25, 2007, tucked inside an Iraq war spending bill. The story shows both what a new majority can do in its first weeks and how much it depends on everyone else.

A promise written for a sticker

The "first hundred hours" was a campaign device, and a good one. Before the 2006 election, House Democrats compressed their agenda into a short list that fit on a card: carry out the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission; raise the minimum wage; expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research; let Medicare negotiate drug prices; cut interest rates on student loans; and roll back tax breaks for oil companies to pay for clean energy. The bills were even numbered in advance. H.R. 1 would be the 9/11 bill, H.R. 2 the minimum wage, and so on down to H.R. 6.

The clock was a slightly elastic one. Democrats counted legislative hours, the time the House was actually in session, rather than calendar hours, which gave them a few weeks of real time to work through the list. Critics noticed and mocked the accounting. It did not matter much. By the time the House passed the energy bill later that month, all six had cleared the chamber, and the promise, as stated, had been kept.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it says something about what a House majority actually controls. The Speaker and the Rules Committee decide what reaches the floor and under what terms. A disciplined majority can pass almost anything it agrees on, quickly, with the minority able to object but not to stop it. The House is built for speed. Everything that happened to the minimum wage after January 10 happened somewhere else.

Why the number had sat still for a decade

The federal minimum wage is not indexed to anything. It changes only when Congress passes a law and a president signs it. The last increase before 2007 had been signed in 1996, with the final step taking effect in September 1997, when the floor reached $5.15 an hour. Then nothing happened for nearly ten years.

Prices did not wait. Every year that the number stayed put, inflation shaved a bit off what a minimum-wage paycheck could buy. By the mid-2000s the real value of the federal minimum had fallen to one of its lowest points in decades. Meanwhile states had started moving on their own. A wave of state ballot measures and legislative votes pushed state minimums above the federal floor, and in November 2006 voters in several states, including Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona, approved increases at the ballot box. Some of those measures also tied future raises to inflation, which the federal law has never done.

The ballot results told Democrats something useful. Raising the minimum wage was not a niche cause. It won in places that voted Republican for president, often by wide margins. That is the kind of issue a new majority wants at the top of its list: popular across the usual dividing lines, simple to explain, and easy to put on a card.

There was an argument on the other side, and it deserved a hearing then as it does now. Business groups and many economists warned that raising the cost of entry-level labor would lead employers to hire fewer people, cut hours or automate, and that the workers hurt most would be the least experienced. The research on that question has gone back and forth for decades, with careful studies finding small or no job losses from moderate increases and other studies finding real ones, especially for teenagers and in low-wage regions. The honest summary is that the effect depends on how big the raise is relative to local wages and how fast it arrives. The 2007 bill answered that worry in its design: it did not jump to the new number at once. It climbed in three steps over two years.

Six days to the floor, then the Senate

H.R. 2, the Fair Minimum Wage Act, came to the House floor on January 10, 2007. It raised the federal minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 in three stages of 70 cents each. The bill was short and clean, and it passed with well over three hundred votes, including a large bloc of Republicans who had no wish to explain a no vote to their own districts.

Then the bill crossed the Capitol, and the pace changed. The Senate is not designed for speed. A determined minority can require sixty votes to end debate on nearly anything, and Senate Republicans, along with some moderate Democrats, wanted something in exchange: tax relief for small businesses, the employers most likely to feel the cost of a higher wage floor. Republicans had in fact tried to pair a minimum wage increase with tax cuts before, including a 2006 House bill that tied the raise to a cut in the estate tax, a combination Democrats saw as a poison pill and that died in the Senate.

So the 2007 Senate version carried a package of small-business tax breaks. It passed the Senate on February 1 by a lopsided margin. Now the two chambers had two different bills, and House Democrats had promised a clean raise. Ways and Means Democrats, who guard the House's constitutional right to originate revenue measures, were not eager to accept tax provisions written first in the Senate. The bill stalled in the gap between the chambers through February and March.

This is the part of a hundred-day story that tends to get cut from the highlight reel. Passing a bill in one chamber is a press release. Reconciling it with the other chamber is where the real bargaining happens, and the side with the most patience usually wins.

How a wage law ended up inside a war bill

The vehicle that finally carried the raise was the one bill Congress could not avoid passing that spring: emergency money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraq war was the defining issue of the 2006 election, and the new Democratic majority used the supplemental spending bill to press President George W. Bush. The first version Congress sent him included a timetable for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq. Bush vetoed it on May 1, 2007. The House tried to override and fell well short of two-thirds. Democrats had to write a second bill that the president would sign, and they dropped the binding timetable.

Along the way, the minimum wage increase and a package of small-business tax breaks were folded into the war funding bill. Democrats got their wage increase; Republicans got their tax relief; the troops got their money; and the president got a bill without a deadline. Bush signed the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act on May 25, 2007. The minimum wage raise rode along inside it.

Many progressives were furious about the trade, and their anger was not about the wage. It was about the war. To them, the second bill showed a majority that had campaigned against the Iraq war and then funded it without conditions. That argument was real and it lasted. But the episode also showed an iron rule of a divided government: a must-pass bill becomes a train, and everyone tries to hitch a car to it. The minimum wage got on board because the war money had to leave the station.

What the raise did, and what it did not do

The law moved the federal minimum in steps: to $5.85 on July 24, 2007, to $6.55 a year later, and to $7.25 on July 24, 2009. It also extended the federal minimum to the Northern Mariana Islands on a slower schedule, a provision that drew its own controversy over the islands' economy.

For millions of workers, including many who earned a bit above the old floor and whose pay was pegged to it, the raise was real money. It arrived, as it happened, in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s. The third step took effect in the summer of 2009, when unemployment was climbing fast. Critics later pointed to that timing as the worst possible moment to raise labor costs; supporters answered that low-wage workers spend nearly everything they earn, so the extra pay went straight back into local businesses when demand was collapsing. Both arguments have been made by serious people, and the recession makes it hard to isolate the wage's own effect.

Here is the fact that turns the 2007 story from a victory lap into a warning. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25. It has not moved since July 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since the federal minimum was created in 1938. A worker earning it today has lost a large share of the buying power that the 2007 law delivered. The raise that took a new majority five months to pass has been eroded for more than seventeen years by a Congress that has not voted to change it.

States, again, did the work Washington did not. Many now have minimums well above the federal floor, and a number index theirs to inflation. Several cities go further. But a large group of states, mostly in the South and the Plains, still use the federal number, so the $7.25 floor remains the actual wage floor for workers there. You can see every state's current minimum on our state-by-state minimum wage table.

The lessons for the majority that takes over in 2027

Democrats won the House and the Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. Donald Trump is still president. That is a different arrangement from 2007, when Democrats took both chambers with a Republican in the White House, but it rhymes with it closely enough that the history is worth reading as a manual. Here's the argument I'd draw from it.

First, the short list works. A majority that names a handful of bills in advance, with numbers attached, gives itself a way to show voters it did what it said. The hundred-hours list was criticized as a gimmick, and it was partly a gimmick. It also gave members something to point to by the end of January, which is no small thing for a majority that knows its bigger plans will run into a veto.

Second, the House can only promise House votes. Of the six bills, the raise and the student loan rate cut became law that year, the latter folded into a larger college-cost bill. The 9/11 Commission bill became law that summer in revised form. The stem cell bill was vetoed. Medicare drug price negotiation died and stayed dead for fifteen years, until the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 finally allowed Medicare to negotiate prices for a limited set of drugs. A list is a statement of priorities, not a guarantee.

Third, the bill that passes rarely looks like the bill introduced. The clean raise became a raise plus business tax cuts, attached to a war bill the left hated. Whether that trade was worth it is a fair argument. What is not fair is pretending there was a cleaner path. With a president of the other party, the realistic choice is often between a compromised law and a pure press release.

Fourth, and this is where progressives have sometimes made life harder for themselves, a raise without automatic indexing is a raise with an expiration date. The 2007 law set a number and stopped. If the next increase does the same, the same erosion will start the day it takes effect. Tying the minimum wage to inflation or to median wages, as many states now do, is the difference between winning once and winning for good. The idea has backers in both parties at the state level; several of the indexed state minimums were passed by voters in states that lean Republican.

The workers behind the number

It is easy to talk about the minimum wage as a line in a table. The people it touches are mostly adults, not the teenagers of the old stereotype; many are women, many work in restaurants, retail, home care and cleaning, and many hold more than one job. For a full-time worker at $7.25, a year's pay comes to about fifteen thousand dollars before taxes. That is the figure the 2007 law left behind, and that a full-time worker in a $7.25 state still lives on.

Those workers are not abstractions to the people who represent them, in either party. Some of the most consistent support for raising state minimums has come from rural counties where wages are low and the cost of a car, which nobody there can do without, keeps going up. The coalition that raised the minimum wage in 2007 crossed party lines in the House vote, in the Senate vote and in the ballot measures that preceded both. It can again.

What you can do

• Learn your state's number before you argue about it. Our minimum wage table lists every state's current minimum, so you can see whether your state still uses the $7.25 federal floor or sets its own, and the inequality dashboard shows how real wages and the top 1 percent's wealth share have moved since 2009.
• Tell the people who will vote on it. Put your address into the representative finder and you will get your House member, both senators and your state legislators, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes. A short call that names a number and asks about indexing is more useful than a long one.
• Watch what the new majority puts on its list. Our topic page on the new majority follows the bills Democrats plan for January 2027 and the coverage of each one, so you can hold them to whatever they promise.
• Find the people already organizing. Wage campaigns are run by worker centers, unions and local coalitions. The organizations directory lists groups by cause in every state, unions and worker advocates among them.

Nancy Pelosi's photograph with the children is the image of January 2007. The image of May 2007 is less charming: a wage increase riding inside a war appropriation, signed without ceremony by a president who had vetoed the first version. Both pictures are true, and a majority that wants to deliver for working people needs to understand the second one as well as the first.