With regards to a minimum wage increase hurting small businesses, that's also simply not true. First of all, money does not have a hardline value - $5 now is not worth the same amount as $5 eight years ago. With that in mind, businesses are actually paying their employees LESS now than what they were eight years ago. That $5 is not only less valuable to the person receiving it, it also has the same lower value to the person paying it. Second, all the empirical evidence points to a higher minimum wage being, at the very least, a "not bad" thing. See
this and
this. To be honest though, I'm not surprised by this vote. It's not the first time Congress has voted in opposition to what has been shown by numerous studies on policy effects and it won't be the last.