Republican Tuaregs

Bandits McConnell, DeMint and Vitter

I just returned from a trip to Mali. On my travel blog I talked about my first encounter with the Tuaregs, a vicious, ignorant and primitive warlike tribe from the wastes of the Sahara-- sort of the GOP of Mali. Although Tuaregs still hold slaves in neighboring Mauritania, they gave up on slavery in Mali in 1973. For unfettered free-marketeers like Republicans and Tuaregs, slavery-- or, at worst, feudalism-- is the ideal relationship between capital and labor.

Here in the U.S. neither serfdom nor slavery is condoned any longer, not even in the most backward and ignorant parts of South Carolina or Alabama. So Republicans have been doing all they can to destroy the progress working families have made by attacking labor unions, the vehicles for their success and the engine of a vibrant middle class, bane of right-wing reactionaries. Right now the focus of that battle is the desperate GOP attempt to torpedo EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which Republican extremists in the Senate managed to filibuster in 2008. Each of the GOP senators leaving that body after the November election-- Ted Stevens (AK), Pete Domenici (NM), Norm Coleman (MN), Gordon Smith (OR), Wayne Allard (CO), John Warner (VA), John Sununu (NH), Elizabeth Dole (NC) was an EFCA opponent and each was replaced by the voters with an EFCA supporter.

Right wing propagandists insist that the battle against EFCA is a battle to save the secret ballot, sheer nonsense. But today's latest blast from the Republican Party's Wall Street Journal editorial page is on full attack-- and claiming that their latest battle against labor unions will be won because of the connivance of reactionary Democrats. They point to EFCA ex-sponsor Mark Pryor, who just won another 6 year term with no opposition from either a real Democrat or a real Republican. Pryor is arguably the dumbest and most right-wing-- not that those two characteristics don't ever stack up behind each other-- member of the Democratic caucus. (You doubt me? Watch this. Yes, he thinks it's funny that really ignorant throwbacks from the Bronze Age, like himself, are in the Senate.)

Rightists are using Pryor's pathetic "wobbly" position on EFCA as an indication that Senate Democrats are cooling on the bill.

[T]he political ground is already shifting under Big Labor's card-check initiative. The unions poured unprecedented money and manpower into getting Democrats elected; their payoff was supposed to be a bill that would allow them to intimidate more workers into joining unions. The conventional wisdom was that Barack Obama and an unfettered Democratic majority would write that check, lickety-split.

Instead, union leaders now say they are being told card check won't happen soon. It seems the Obama team plans to devote its opening months to important issues, like the economy, and has no intention of jumping straight into the mother of all labor brawls. It also seems Majority Leader Harry Reid, even with his new numbers, might not have what it takes to overcome a filibuster. It's a case study in how quickly a political landscape can change, and how frequently the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Are they correct? Other than Blanche Lincoln, who is up for re-election in 2010 and who is as right-wing and cowardly as Pryor, it isn't likely any Democrat will actually oppose EFCA, although the worst of the lot will want to work with the Chamber of Commerce and the GOP extremists to shorten it. I wonder if they'll eventually try to abolish weekends too.