Card trick: Lincoln says 'whoa' on union bill
Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln—recently challenged by reps from the Arkansas business community for being all mealy-mouthed on the proposed ‘card check’ bill being pushed by labor unions—now says that the card check legislation may not be necessary.
In this AP story by the Mysterious Reporter With No Name Because They’re Stickin’ It to the Man with a Byline Strike, Lincoln strikes a potentially more business-friendly tone on the issue:
“I don’t see this bill as being the solution to those problems, and I don’t see us focusing on that bill as helping us to solve those problems,” Lincoln said. “If what we want to do is strengthen our economy, create jobs, create a better working environment for working families and workers in this country and create a better environment for business to be successful, then it’s not focusing on the Employee Free Choice Act.”Lincoln said she thinks the act has “room for improvement,” and indicated she’d be more open to talking about the measure once other issues are addressed first.“Just to bring this up and say this is going to solve problems, we try really hard to not do things that way,” Lincoln said. “The point is, we try to go through the hearing process, which is what we’ve tried to do on health care and tax reform and other things we’ve had all these hearings on.”
One potential GOP challenger to Lincoln, former interim U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin, who was smoked out by blogger Jason Tolbert this week, has challenged Lincoln on this card check business. Read the whole thing.
Former Arkansas Farm Bureau head Stanley Reed was unavailable for comment, because it turns out he’s not running.
Update: National attention to this matter from Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, as well as The Weekly Standard.
And blogging fiend K. Ryan James, an expatriate Arkansan sentenced to the nation’s capital, issues a challenge to Lincoln:
Based upon these words, Sen. Lincoln feels that any focus on voting to pass Card Check before these other issues would be an incorrect application of priorities in the United States Senate. Thankfully, Sen. Lincoln has the power to place a hold on this legislation should it come to the floor ahead of the issues she deemed important.With this in mind, I call on Sen. Lincoln to publicly promise to the voters of Arkansas that she will place a hold on the Card Check bill, preventing it coming to the floor for a vote, until the Senate passes legislation which will – in her words – “strengthen our economy, create jobs, create a better working environment for working families and workers in this country and create a better environment for business to be successful.”
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