After watching their legislative priorities stall for months, Democrats should be able to go home for the Memorial Day recess with a long-awaited achievement: enactment of a higher minimum wage.

The increase in the federal minimum wage over two years — to $7.25 an hour, from $5.15 — is part of an amendment expected to be considered on the Iraq spending bill (HR 2206) on Thursday. If, as anticipated, the bill is cleared by the Senate and signed by President Bush, the wage increase will become the first piece of the Democrats’ “Six for ’06” agenda to become law.

And yet, that victory will be embedded in what some view as the party’s biggest defeat this year: a war spending bill that fails to impose deadlines for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

The wage boost is a “great accomplishment,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. The freshman said she is learning quickly that, in the legislative process, “You never get a completely sweet victory. It’s always going to be the yin and the yang.”

Still, Democrats may not get much of a political boost from touting the wage increase during the upcoming recess, said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash.

“Nobody’s dying [because of] the minimum wage, or lack of it,” he said. “The war is what’s going to be on the front burner.”

Yet, the wage increase has survived an unusual number of procedural twists and turns on its legislative journey.

The House passed legislation that would increase the minimum wage (HR 2) during the second week of the 110th Congress, but Democratic senators quickly realized they lacked enough votes for the measure unless they added a sweetener.

So the Senate attached a package of $8.3 billion in tax breaks aimed at blunting the wage increase’s effect on small businesses, offset by revenue increases. In response, the House passed a new bill (HR 976) that included $1.3 billion in tax breaks and revenue increases.

The difference between the tax plans left the chambers at odds for weeks, a logjam broken when Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., House Ways and Means chairman, and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., agreed on a $4.84 billion version of the tax package. Republicans objected, turning a House-Senate divide into a partisan split.

Lawmakers attached the Baucus-Rangel compromise to the first version of the war spending bill (HR 1591), which President Bush vetoed.

If the president signs the latest version of the war spending bill, the minimum wage would rise from $5.15 to $5.85 an hour in 60 days. The next increase, to $6.55, would occur a year after the signing. The final jump, to $7.25 an hour, would happen two years from now.

The Iraq debate showed that Bush won’t get a blank check from Congress, said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, D-N.Y.

And, he noted, the other items in the spending bill are important, too, calling the wage increase a major accomplishment.

“People have been waiting for the minimum wage for a long time,” Meeks said.