OVERHEATED IN WASHINGTON

A proposed increase in the minimum wage, the first since 1997, arrives in the Senate this week with two burdens that would shame the average person, though it might not bother Congress. Maine’s senators should look at the raw politics of this vote and its unaffordable increase in the national debt and want no part of it.

Republicans generally oppose an increase in the minimum wage, in this case from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over three years. But they are willing to vote for it if they also get a tax break for the very wealthy, a cut in the estate tax that would exempt the first $5 million ($10 million for couples) and provide a discounted rate up to $30 million.

To attract a sufficient number of Democrats to the bill, Republicans have added regional measures on mining, rural development and timber taxation, passing it in the House before representatives left Washington for the next six weeks. The estimated price just for the estate-tax break between 2012 and 2021 is approximately $750 billion, an amount the nation cannot nearly afford. But Congress stopped trying to figure out how to pay for its desires in 2000, and is pleased to leave that problem until after the next election, or the one after that.

The minimum-wage vote marks the third time this year Republican leaders have tried to reduce or eliminate the estate tax, after having withdrawn it from a package of tax-cut extensions earlier this year and then apparently dropping it from ongoing pension legislation. The change in the pension bill reinvigorated an argument between House and Senate GOP leaders.

Last week, House negotiators, having got their estate cut, other extensions and a minimum wage increase, boycotted a meeting on the pension bill, causing Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley, who had been promised the estate provision in that bill, to say he had been “stabbed in the back.”

The fingerprints on the knife would belong to his own leader, Sen. Bill Frist, who has been cutting deals with House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, thereby undercutting Republican senators. The rules and usual courtesies of the Senate, where issues can be resolved only when negotiation and compromise are allowed, are being ignored these days and the result will be a more contentious, less productive place.

The minimum-wage bill, carrying an unaffordable tax and a knife-wielding leadership, could more profitably return after the August recess, absent the estate-tax provisions and perhaps with cooler leadership that would see the problem of hijacking a bill to help the poor with a measure to reward the rich.