Sen. McCaskill: Senate Unlikely to Raise EFCA Again in 2010; "Card Check Provision Abandoned"
The Hill's Blog Briefing Room today reports that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has told local Missouri journalists that the Employee Free Choice Act is unlikely to be addressed in the Senate in 2010:
"I don't think that card check is going to come up," McCaskill said during a weekly conference call with Missouri journalists. "It has not come up, and believe me: if card check, the way it was drafted, was going to come up, it probably would have come up early in 2009 as opposed to now."
McCaskill further restated, as has long been suspected, that the "card check" provision is unlikely to be included in any eventual labor law reform proposal:
"I think there's a lot of negotiation that's going on about card check," McCaskill said. "Businesses are at the table, and frankly I don't think the card checking part is the part that's being discussed at this point; I think that's been abandoned."
This sets the table for an interesting dilemma in the House. SEIU President Andy Stern has consistently called for an up or down vote on a bill containing card check -- in part to put legislators on record heading into elections. But late last year, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced that the House would not act before the Senate on controversial measures in 2010.
