Has anyone told the Democrats that they lost the last couple of election cycles? It’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker or push too hard against the delusions of the mentally unstable, but somebody might want to give them a gentle nudge. The Fight for 15 is back and Democrats in Congress are getting ready to start a fresh push for a massive national minimum wage hike. AR Squared has the details of who is behind this new brainstorm.

Bloomberg reported this afternoon that a cadre of Congress’ most left-wing lawmakers are set to unveil a push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, despite the fact that this effort would eliminate millions of jobs.

It’s clear that this is simply a partisan stunt and even these elected officials would concede that their outlandish proposal stands zero chance of passing. On top of the fact that a federal $15 minimum wage would destroy an estimated 7 million jobs, even leading Democrat policymakers have conceded that the idea has many flaws.

Given that any legislation to do this will need to get past both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell (not to mention President Trump), who would embark on such a scheme and why? Well, the list of names could provide a clue. It’s Bernie Sanders, Patty Murray, Keith Ellison, Bobby Scott and Raul Grijalva. What do they have in common? Well, in at least a few cases it’s a couple of things. The most obvious is that Sanders and Ellison have well known national ambitions and the others may as well. But the other common factor is that all of them have taken in some very generous donations from labor unions, particularly the SEIU.

This leads me to believe that this is political posturing for 2018 and 2020. Given who is in charge in Washington right now this proposal should be a non-starter. But it really doesn’t matter if they pass it as long as they score some political points. Plus, reality can be a harsh mistress. Don’t forget that when San Francisco did this recently they saw a spate of Restaurants closing down. Other examples are legion. But the SEIU spent more than $19M to promote the Fight for 15 last year and Democrats pay attention to that sort of thing. That’s despite the fact that it’s a well known fact that the SEIU is actually more interested in politics than the welfare of the workers and they don’t actually want their own members to get the $15 wage.

This is all political theater. But hey… they’ve got to do something to keep all their followers showing up for protest marches every weekend, right?