When the new 110th Congress convenes this week, it can count on intensive and sustained pressure from organized labor to enact pressing agenda items. Unions spent an estimated $100 million on the 2006 midterm elections, with the AFL-CIO paying for about $40 million of the tab. The candidates benefiting from this largesse, directly or indirectly, were overwhelmingly Democratic. Now that the Democrats have regained a majority in the House of Representatives and (to a lesser extent) in the Senate, ending a dozen years of frustration, labor bosses want Congress to deliver the goods. That means hiking the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour; restricting free-trade agreements; and expanding employee health and safety coverage. Most of all, it means passing card-check legislation, introduced in the last Congress by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., that would enable unions to obtain exclusive representation of workers without necessarily having to win a majority in a secret-ballot election. In effect, labor officials want Congress to seriously compromise a principle of more than 70 years of established labor law.
In recent days, Barack Obama gathered with House and Senate Democrats in the Cabinet Room of the White House to “negotiate” health care. They no doubt grew alarmed as Scott Brown surged in the polls, but they seemed strangely unaware that their very actions — meeting behind closed doors in a rump legislative conference from which Republicans were excluded — were fueling the outrage that would make possible a Brown victory.
Paul Krugman has become to print media what Keith Olbermann is to television:
