Stop Me Before I Vote Again

From the next world, old champions mobilize to view the contest ahead: Mr Republican, Bob Taft, and Daddy Wagner himself.

Today the Employee Free Choice Act was introduced once again in the House.

After a swan ride through that body, it occurs to me there might be a mighty comical Senatorial grapple over this too-long-dangling measure.

We might just get treated to the finest of all great American football games. Just imagine -- 100 senators present in the flesh, feeling very imposed-upon about having to show up, een the pheesical sense, in that august chamber.

Here's a recent shot fired from the roof of one of our hallowed halls of personal liberty, the famed Heritage Foundation:

"Unions now want the government to take away workers' right to vote -- after only a card-check campaign. The Employee Free Choice Act would do this and more."

"Hey bub, are not privacy and choice the very Mutt and Jeff of our nation's liberty? We must guaad with our blood and our treasure the sacred individual personal private right to choose. The choice to unite or not to unite is a choice each solitary soul's secret unrevealed conscience must make. The ballot box is a confessional, without the disadvantage of a sacerdote; a registration of faith and hope in individual stand-alone judgement. I the atom of society must choose, alone, unafraid, unaffected, uninfluenced, individually, privately, secretly -- so we the people can be free."

Nonsense -- right?

Well, actually, when we get down to it, this act turns ugly complex prickled and spiteful on us.

I wonder if the corporate mouthpieces can summon the old Mittelstand pandemonium here, to make the scrap look especially noble?

I mean a defense of our individual freedoms led by that Great Satan -- personal privacy. If that happens -- and why wouldn't it -- watch us all drown in that corporate whore lady Liberty's scat.

Imagine a quagmire like the following: Senator Blowhard from Dixie Incorporated intones:

"My fellow senators, I ask you: what exactly is the foundation of this towering paragon of freedom that is our blessed America? Ah say it is nothing less than... the secret ballot!

"Only this can fairly and squarely transcend the bonds of individual contract. If we are to violate the right of any one honest independent soul to assign his labor for a certain period of time and for a certain portion of pay by an act of hiw own free unencumbered will -- then we must be sure it's violated to a higher authority and a higher right.

"Such independent consent can be transcended through one process only: each involved soul must cast one informed carefully considered vote, and these must be cast in secret, until the process establishes a clear and stable majority of those concerned.

"In the last analysis, the crux of the crux is an absolutely positively REQUIRED commitment to that most beloved of our republican institutions, here writ small, perhaps, but indispensable nonetheless....

"We must have the secret ballot or no unions at all!

As John Locke, fairy godfather of us all, once said: 'If we are to be free men there can be no compromising our individual liberty.'"

Now add in to this reckless scramble some pwog piecard fancy-boy, hurling the left's hammer of Thor:

"Senator, you are a fool, and a hog slopped at the corporate trough. You wouldn't know democracy from an ice cream soda. The ground for a free and open competition for support between union and company cannot exist under the present conditions inside our job sites.

"Freedom, liberty, the very civil rights of humanity, American style, end completely and absolutely at the entrance to any one of our unorganized places of business.

"O I hear it now -- the song of the equilibrist:

'Given enough time, any open honest free-wheeling campaign to organize, under any possible set of rules and refs will lead to fair and balanced results.'

"But under the realities of job time today, if it culminates in a secret balloting process, after the company wall guards have had the time to lower the boom...."

"'One law' for the lion and the lamb is tyranny!"

This act, when and if it finally reaches senate floor consideration, is headed at best for a crucial set of amendments.

Union piecards: listen to me now, believe me later. Your watchword oughta be "speed" Whatever you squeeze out, make it all happen fast

Secret ballot must stand? Okay. But then a vote must follow the filing in less than a work week, and the contract must follow the vote in less than a month.

On a broader note:

If job force America needs to conduct a self-liberation movement -- and it sure as shootin' does -- what actually is the clincher here among the proposed reforms in this act? Do any amount to anything?

I think so; but then I'm a semi-syndicalist deviant.

At any rate: what minimum collection of reforms would amount to progress toward the goal of employee liberation? What reforms will aid, and what subvert, the collective will of the job-site majority?

The nub here, the line where class divides will surface fast and furious, will be over this poser:

Does group influence need legislative nullification?