Tomorrow, Craig Becker's, the WH nominee for National Labor Relations Board, a former AFL-CIO and SEIU lawyer, nomination will be killed by the Senate.
Why? Scott Brown wants to be seated early and Harry Reid didn't fight for it. Scott Brown coming in means, absent some GOP support which is unlikely means that this nomination will be killed.
Craig Becker Nomination probably killed
Already, we know that the Employee Free Choice Act would probably stand zero chance in the Senate. There was a hope that some changes could be made at the National Labor Relations Board in the regulatory sense. It wouldn't completely be EFCA but it would get a lot of it. Unfortunately that would require a functioning Labor Board. That doesn't appear to be in the cards.
Thanks to Sen. McCain and Sen. Reid, there's no chance this will happen if at all.
But the way the Becker nomination now seems poised to play out seems, at once, incredibly grueling for the nominee himself and a re-affirmation that, tactically, Republicans remain light years ahead of their Democratic counterparts.
An associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union since 1990 and previously counsel for the AFL-CIO, Becker was targeted immediately by GOP lawmakers for being too sympathetic to labor for a post at the NLRB. The White House urged unions not to launch a public campaign around his appointment, arguing that it would pass Congress via an "inside game," a source working on the process told the Huffington Post.
The strategy nearly worked. Becker was approved by the Senate HELP committee last fall by a 15-8 vote. But he was sent back to the president at the end of the 2009 session after McCain put a hold on the nomination.
So, we're going to have no Dawn Johnsen, no Craig Becker, no EFCA, because everyone got frustrated and kept their eyes off the prize. A lot of people got mad at healthcare. I got mad at the process of doing healthcare. But this is why the bigger picture is SO important. Yes, we can get mad, but losing a seat costs us dearly. Tomorrow we'll see why.