Mickey Kaus, the reform-minded blogger now at The Daily Caller, takes note of the comments of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)  conceding the legislative death of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). According to a report in The Hill, Brown told WVIZ radio, “It’s not going to happen now.”

To which Kaus responds with cynicism disguised by yuck yuck. From “Why K Street Hates Sherrod Brown”:

Brown may have just sent K Street into recession, if that’s possible. Big Business and Small Business, terrified of the “card check” bill–including its mandatory government arbitration provisions–spent heavily on lobbyists to fight it.  How many former Senate staffers have fed their children for the past three years off of the “card check” menace? Businesses are unlikely to keep the fees flowing if the threat has disappeared. They should take up a collection to bring [Atlantic reporter Mark] Ambinder back from National Journal. Or to pay Sherrod Brown to be quiet.  … You’d think by now Brown would know proper D.C. etiquette, which is to pretend “card check” still might, just might, pass, maybe in some “compromise” form. That way Democrats are happy–they’ve led labor on for another cycle–and K Street is happy. Keep hope alive! It’s good for the juice.) …

You bet, the Employee Free Choice Act was a good issue to energize the troops and raise funds for ad campaigns and lobbying. Small, family-owned businesses especially hate the idea of an undemocratic process — card check — being used to turn their operations over to labor unions. Other companies recognized in the Employee Free Choice labor’s strategy for undermining the competitive advantages of locating in right-to-work states. The binding arbitration provisions were indeed anathema to employers: A federal appointee would impose contracts on them!

Of course, labor would not have put so many millions into the bill if they did not see it as necessary to revive private-sector unionization.

NLRB Member Craig Becker

Still, all the calls to action and appeals for money to oppose EFCA would have fallen flat if the bill had not been a real threat to become law. H.R. 800 passed the House in 2007 by a vote of 241-185, and 51 Senators voted for cloture. That was before President Obama, an ardent supporter, won election in 2008. Of course, business groups geared up to fight the bill. They could no longer rely on President Bush to veto the bill.

And now the Employee Free Choice Act is dead, at least legislatively. No one has even bothered to introduce a bill this session.

But at the risk of being accused of ginning up a threat, we assert that labor is still actively working to achieve the fundamental goal of the legislation: rigging the game to favor private-sector unions at the expense of employers. Now they’re just relying on their allies in the Executive Branch to use regulations, orders and decisions to push through the labor agenda. (continue reading…)

Why Mickey Kaus is such a valuable commentator: Who else would have thought to connect the Employee Free Choice Act to the Journolist scandalette?

From Kaus’s post, “Journolist–The Careerist Antidote to Neolib Contrarianism“:

Here’s a crude test: In this group of 400 “center to left” writers, did even one agree with George McGovern about keeping the secret ballot in union elections? If they agreed, did they dare say they agreed?

Mickey Kaus, a reform-minded Democrat and commentator from California, congratulates Congressional Democrats for passing the health care legislation. From “Not So Sudden Victory“:

Whatever CBO says or doesn’t say, I don’t for one minute believe that the bill’s new, highly subsidized system of insurance “exchanges”– allowing millions of less affluent citizens to gain access to ever-more-complicated medical technology–will “bend the curve” of health care costs downwards or help the nation’s deficit situation. I’d be surprised if even a third of the Democrats who voted for the bill believe it. I suspect most of them support the bill for the same reasons most Democrats do–as a crucial step in preventing trivial and superficial economic contrasts from translating into ultimate and profound life and death decisions.

They–we–know there will almost certainly be a big additional bill to pay down the road. It will be even bigger if, as we can hope and expect, government attempts to restrict potentially useful treatments in the name of economy prove unsustainably unpopular. But it will be easier to pay this bill once everyone is in the same system–when old people can’t argue that their care is being cut in order to insure the young, etc.. We will all be figuring out how to pay for ourselves.

Kaus is challenging Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Democratic primary, running for the sake of argument, as it were. We’ve always appreciated his good humor, abhorrence of cant and reform-mindedness.

The always-nugget-rich Kausfiles has several items on organized labor and the Employee Free Choice Act that shed more light on card check’s failing fortunes.

Hadn’t seen this elsewhere (scroll down):

Buried Lede of the Day: Thomas Edsall, summarizing a new Pew poll, notes the Dems have gained some support recently! While Republicans have lost ground! And voters care more about the economy than “moral values.”   

We knew that. What we maybe didn’t know is this:  

Conversely, public support for labor unions appears to be weakening: the percentage of people agreeing that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person,” has dropped from 74 percent at the start of this decade to 61 percent this year. The decline was sharper — from 76 to 53 percent, a 23 point fall — among independent voters than among either Democrats or Republicans. [E.A.]

Some 61% say labor unions are “too powerful,” a big jump from 52% in 1999. … Support for unions, says Pew, is at an “all-time low.”. …  Also, perhaps counter-intuitively, “‘the overall balance of public opinion on the government’s responsibility to provide for the needy has shifted to the right’ despite the onset of a severe recession.” This rightward movement appears to be the result of growing fear among the above $75K set (a big set) that the poor have become too dependent on government programs. …

Kaus, the reform-minded Democrat, has more on EFCA in this post.

Mickey Kaus, a reform-minded Democrat, is one of the few almost-mainstream-media giving the Employee Free Choice Act an extended, serious examination. After attending a public discussion on the legislation, he writes at Kausfiles, “Card Check” Not as Bad as Thought! It’s Worse.”

The arbitration parts of the card check bill are so vaguely drawn that nobody knows who the arbitrators will be. The job appears to be delegated entirely to the Federal Mediation Service. The FMS might decide to use its own employees. It might decide to use arbitrators from the private sector selected along more traditional lines. The two breakfast debaters (Prof. Richard Epstein and attorney Anthony Segall) did seem to agree that, since thousands of arbitrators might quickly be needed for the expected explosion of mandatory arbitration, it’s unlikely they would all be newly hired GS-12s. But they don’t know.

And…

I have been worried that big business would sell out small business in the coming negotiations on a “compromise,” watered-down “card check” bill that everyone expects. Prof. Epstein suggested that, if anything, big business is more terrified of the arbitration provisions than small business–simply because big businesses are more complicated and therefore they have a lot more to lose if an unfamiliar arbitrator suddenly steps in and starts messing around and running things. … P.S.: But doesn’t that suggest another possible sell out, in which the arbitration provisions of “card check” get dropped while the more notorious anti-secret ballot provisions stay in? I don’t know. If you are Wal-Mart or Toyota I would think you’d be threatened by both provisions.

Judging from the reaction of NAM members, there’s nothing in the when-will-it-be-introduced? bill to invite compromise of any sort, but small businesses are especially concerned about the card check provisions. If you’re a company with 10 or 20 employees, union organizers could hit the softball team’s game on Wednesday and you could be facing a new union by Monday — with pressure on to get that new contract in place within four months or have an arbitrator set your wages and benefits for two years. In a highly competitive industry, the increased costs could simply kill the company.

Mickey Kaus, reform-minded Democrat who writes at Slate.com, scopes out the political scene and comments:

When I tell my liberal friends that “card check” is one of the big issues in the 2008 campaign, they tend to roll their eyes. But when I tell my conservative friends that “card check” is one of the big issues in 2008 … they roll their eyes too. Apparently the words “card check” are not enough, in themselves, to convey the fundamental shift in industrial organization that might result if workers could trigger unionization under the Wagner Act without a normal secret-ballot election.