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Business as usual.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2249431

Republican leaders are willing to allow the first minimum wage increase in a decade but only if it’s coupled with a cut in inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates, lawmakers said Friday.

As the House pointed toward a session stretching past midnight, it was anything but certain that the plan would work. In fact, the move seemed unlikely to result in a hike in the minimum wage, which has been frozen at $5.15 per hour for a decade.

Republicans hoped to put Democrats in the uncomfortable position of voting against the minimum wage increase and the estate tax cut and an accompanying bipartisan package of popular tax breaks, including a research and development credit for businesses and deductions for college tuition and state sales taxes.

But there was GOP discontent, too. Some conservative in the House were unhappy about the minimum wage vote while moderates in the party were restive about it being tied to cuts in the estate tax.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledged to kill the hybrid minimum wage/tax cut bill if it got to the Senate.

“The Senate has rejected fiscally irresponsible estate tax giveaways before and will reject them again,” Reid said. “Blackmailing working families will not change that outcome.”

The GOP package would increase the wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, phased in over the next three years, said Kevin Madden, spokesman for House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

It would also exempt $5 million of an individual’s estate, and $10 million of a couple’s, from estate taxes by 2015. Estates worth up to $25 million would be taxed at capital gains rates, currently 15 percent and scheduled to rise to 20 percent. Tax rates on the remainder of larger estates would fall to 30 percent by 2015.

The maneuver was aimed at defusing the wage hike as a campaign issue for Democrats while using the popularity of the increase to achieve the Republican Party’s longtime goal of permanently cutting taxes on the estates of millionaires and small businessmen.