NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all have sharply worded editorials today chastising Republicans such as Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions has vowed to vote against cloture for the Hamilton nomination after years of haranguing Democrats for daring to block Republican judicial nominees.

Hamilton is a widely respected federal judge in Indiana who has the support of his home state’s Republican senator, Richard Lugar. But critics, who call him “the anti-Jesus pro-Allah judge”, don’t like that he ruled against allowing sectarian prayers as part of the official proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives. They also don’t like that he struck down a law requiring women to have face-to-face counseling before being allowed to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.

While it’s not surprising that some Republicans don’t like those rulings, that’s not supposed to be grounds for blocking a vote on the president’s nominee. No one is arguing that the Yale-educated, former Fulbright fellow who’s won the support of the American Bar Association isn’t qualified for the job. In contrast, Democrats allowed a vote on President George W. Bush’s nomination of Judge Jay Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even though as a Justice Department Lawyer Bybee approved memos authorizing the torture and abuse of detainees that even prominent Republicans have since disavowed and that sparked an ethical investigation into his conduct.

But in addition to Republican obstructionism, President Obama hasn’t exactly gone out on a limb to push his judicial nominations forward. Alliance for Justice has issued a report pointing out the paucity of judges nominated and confirmed by the Senate so far under Obama as compared to the first year of the previous administration. After Obama’s first ten months in office, only five judges had been confirmed by the Senate, 22 nominees remained pending and 97 vacancies were still open. During George W. Bush’s first year in office, the president had nominated 64 judges and won confirmation of 18 by mid-November. Meanwhile, Obama is operating with a strong majority of Democrats in the Senate, whereas Bush had to deal with a Democratic-controlled Senate in 2001.

Hamilton is likely to get a vote this week. Even so, the Obama administration still has a lot of catching up to do.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) (WDCpix)

To hear the Democrats tell the tale, the extension of jobless benefits enacted over the weekend will provide those living in high-unemployment states with an additional 20 weeks of insurance.

Well, not quite.

Because the bill was held up for so long in the Senate, an end-of-the-year filing deadline will prevent anyone from accessing the final six weeks of benefits, according to state officials and sources on Capitol Hill.

On Friday, President Obama signed into law legislation extending jobless benefits by 14 weeks nationwide, with an additional six weeks for those states where unemployment rates top 8.5 percent. Those benefits kicked in on Sunday. But there’s a glitch. The new law treats the 20-week extension as two separate extensions of 14 weeks and six weeks, with participants required to exhaust the first 14 weeks before applying for the next six. However, the current law keeps a Dec. 31 application deadline, roughly seven weeks from now, making collecting the full 20 weeks impossible.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

As a result, some members of Congress are already eying another sweeping unemployment extension, which would both address the deadline glitch and provide additional help — well beyond the six weeks in question — to those unable to find work next year, when jobless rates are expected to hover near double digits.

The Orange County Register first reported on the deadline glitch last week.

In a state like California, where unemployment currently stands above 12 percent, that technicality would prove significant. Loree Levy, spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Monday that an estimated 92,000 residents had exhausted all of their available unemployment by the end of October, and roughly 285,000 will be eligible for the newly enacted benefits by the end of the year. Whether they can get 20 weeks or only 14, though, depends on whether Congress extends the filing deadline.

Some in Congress are well aware of the problem. The office of Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) said Monday that he’ll be pushing a proposal to provide as much as an additional year’s worth of jobless benefits. The proposal will be wrapped into a package to include other provisions designed to ease Main Street’s pain amid the downturn, including money to subsidize COBRA health benefits, as well as a provision to extend the full federal funding of a traditionally state-federal unemployment insurance program called FedEd, which got full federal funding under the stimulus bill. Without congressional action, states would again have to pick up part of the FedEd tab at the end of 2009.

McDermott doesn’t have an easy task. The pricetag for extending just the unemployment benefits for one year is roughly $80 billion, the McDermott aide said. With deficit spending having topped $1 trillion in the last fiscal year — and with an enormous health reform proposal in the works — the congressional appetite for expensive new proposals is hardly ravenous. Still, with national unemployment at 10.2 percent — and no wave of new jobs on the horizon — even the most ardent small-government conservatives would have a tough time voting against additional relief.

Update: The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirms that Congress must pass another bill to guarantee the full 20-week extension.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas)

Last week, as House Democrats took to the floor with near-unanimous praise for legislation to help the unemployed and stimulate the fragile economy, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) offered a wildly different message.

“This bill,” he said, “represents a textbook example of how not to deal with the economic challenges that our country faces.”

The Texas Democrat wasn’t talking about the extension of unemployment benefits at the heart of the bill, but an amendment providing the nation’s businesses — even the largest corporations — with tens-of-billions of dollars in tax rebates to stem recent losses. That provision, Doggett claimed, is less an economic stimulant than it is “a corporate giveaway” at the expense of taxpayers. It didn’t help the congressman’s mood that the Democrats’ bill allocates more than four times the funding to the business tax than it does to extending unemployment insurance.

“Today’s bill allocates $2 billion to the winner and $10 billion to the loser,” he said.

Indeed, although the jobless benefits are the centerpiece of the Democrats’ bill, they represent a mere $2.4 billion of the spending, according to the Congressional Budget Office — or just 10 percent of the $24 billion proposal. Nearly half of the money — $10.4 billion — will go toward the so-called loss carry-back extension, which will allow businesses, both large and small, to apply any losses suffered in 2008 and 2009 to income made in the previous five years, three years longer than current law allows. The result will be tax refunds topping $33 billion next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Yet another amendment, to extend a popular $8,000 tax credit for new homebuyers, will cost $10.8 billion over a decade, JCT estimated.

Supporters of the two tax breaks — including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the bill sponsors — argue that they’ll help prop up businesses in the midst of the worst unemployment crisis in 26 years.

Yet an analysis of a similar bill by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, indicates that, in terms of bang-for-the-buck, the lopsided allocations in the stimulus bill are dubious. Indeed, for every dollar spent on the business tax rebate, just 21 cents are returned to the larger economy, according to Zandi. By contrast, the homebuyer tax credit returns 90 cents on the dollar, he found, while the unemployment extension returns $1.61.

Heidi Shierholz, economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said that there’s “no economic rationale” for the business tax rebate. “For whatever reason that [provision] got in there,” she said, “it has nothing to do with stimulating the economy.”

At the start of the debate, it wasn’t in there. Indeed, when the House passed its unemployment extension bill in September, the $1.2 billion proposal stood alone. It was in the Senate, after weeks of delay over controversial amendments, that Democratic leaders decided to sweeten the pot by adding the two tax breaks. Leading up to the upper-chamber vote, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) explained the Democrats’ position.

“The two were put together as a means of greasing the skids,” Harkin told the Huffington Post last week. “You know how things work around here. Could we have gotten UI through otherwise? Yes, we could have, but it would have taken us several days. And we don’t have that kind of time. And the minority is then able to, because of the time, demand certain things.”

Meanwhile, the nation’s unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October — the first time it’s topped 10 percent since 1983. When those who have stopped looking for work are considered, that number tops 17 percent.

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said the carry-back provision, far from an effective stimulus strategy, will merely “delay the inevitable downsizing and consolidation of these industries.”

“The perverse effect,” Pearlstein wrote, “will be to reward the companies that failed to pay down debt and squirrel away cash when times were good and, by artificially keeping them alive, punish the competitors that did.”

Even some conservative economists are doubting the stimulating effect of the loss-carry back provision. Desmond Lachmann, economist at the American Enterprise Institute, said the $33 billion spent next year is simply too small, relative to the larger economy, to stimulate much growth.

“We are talking about 0.2 percent of GDP,” he said.

Doggett took a harsher angle, accusing his colleagues of rewarding the very companies that caused the recent downturn.

“This bill,” Doggett said, “now directs the Treasury to essentially write a check directly to corporations for more than $10 billion — checks to corporations that have committed fraud, checks to corporations that have no ability to create jobs because they have no employees and exist solely on paper as a fiction. It rewards some of the very corporate losers who have brought us to the brink of economic ruin.”

No matter. The House passed the bill 403 to 12, with even Doggett voting in favor. The Senate had passed the bill the day before, 98 to 0.

On Friday, President Obama signed the measure into law.

The Graham amendment is expected to come to a vote today during consideration of the Commerce/Justice/Science appropriations bill. The earlier Homeland Security and Defense Department spending bills already include restrictions on transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States.

This restriction, which is reportedly backed by 150 family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks, would bar the trials of the alleged 9/11 plotters in civilian federal courts, effectively forcing them to be tried by military commissions.

The Obama administration has suggested that it wants to try the 9/11 suspects in federal court, and so far has fought to retain the power to decide where the terror suspects will be tried. Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder warned Senate leaders that Graham’s amendment “would be unwise, and would set a dangerous precedent.”

The administration has said it will begin announcing where it wants to try the terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay by November 16.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis (Department of Labor photo)

A new report released Tuesday by three labor and employment advocacy organizations claims that the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, combined with lax enforcement of labor laws, undermined federal labor standards, leaving not only illegal immigrants but many legal workers at risk of abusive employment practices.

According to a recently released 2008 survey of more than 4,000 low-wage workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, 26 percent of workers said they had not been paid the minimum wage in the previous workweek and 76 percent had not been paid overtime they were legally owed. The survey, conducted by the National Employment Law Project, showed that the emphasis on illegal immigration enforcement has increasingly undermined the government’s responsibility to enforce the labor laws that govern minimum wages and working conditions.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

For example, in September 2008, an employer calling itself “Employers All Dry Water Damage Experts” recruited day laborers in New Orleans and transported them to Beaumont, Texas, where the workers claim, according to the report, that they were told to perform dangerous demolition work in an oil refinery. When the employer refused to pay the $13-an-hour rate he had promised and gave the worst assignments to non-white workers, the report documents, the immigrant workers protested. They say they were evicted from the refinery in the middle of the night without pay. Local police were waiting outside for them, accompanied by an ICE agent. Twelve of them were arrested and detained for more than 76 days. A New Orleans-based advocacy group, The Congress of Day Laborers, secured the release of eight of the workers, but according to their complaint filed with ICE, the agency still initiated deportation proceedings against them.

“I am currently fighting my own deportation because I stood up and demanded pay for the work I had done,” said Josue Diaz, one of the laborers, at 287(G) PROGRAM, despite evidence of its past abuse. The agency says it has improved oversight of local police actions.

“The prior administration seemed to have abandoned the policy of noninterference in labor disputes,” said Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project and co-author of the report, in an interview yesterday. “Certainly the number of people reporting this practice has grown over the years. That’s what got our attention. In the past, we’d been able to say to all workers, you can complain about labor violations, you’re protected. Then we saw that that wasn’t always the case.”

According to the NELP survey, 43 percent of workers who made a complaint to their employer or attempted to form a union experienced one or more forms of illegal retaliation, including threats to call immigration authorities.

Labor complaints are not supposed to lead to retaliation against illegal immigrants. Since 1998 the Labor Department and immigration authorities have operated pursuant to a Memorandum of Understanding that they cooperate only in limited ways. Labor Department officials are not supposed to ask employees about their immigration status, for example, to keep from intimidating employees into not reporting labor law violations. The idea is also to ensure that American employers hire legal employees, because if illegal immigrants can’t enforce the labor laws, that creates a huge incentive for employers to hire them.

But the firewall that existed between the two agencies appears to be breaking down, the report shows.

At the same time, the labor department over the past eight years severely cut back its own enforcement of the labor laws. According to a GAO report issued last year, cited in the report released today, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division routinely failed to enforce the wage and hour laws, filing almost 40 percent fewer legal actions against employers than it did ten years earlier, and in many cases failing to properly investigate and respond to complaints filed by individual workers. Of ten complaints filed by undercover GAO investigators, GAO found that only one was successfully investigated.

A follow-up GAO report this past March found that the agency was still plagued with similar problems. Five of ten labor complaints filed by undercover agents weren’t eeven recorded in the Wage and Hour division’s database, and there were not investigated. In two cases, labor department officials recorded that employers had paid back wages, when, in fact, they had not. Found hundreds of cases mishandled and delayed. In one, for example, the division waited almost two years to investigate a complaint filed by restaurant workers.

Immigration prosecutions, on the other hand, have increased dramatically. As TWI reported in September, in June, immigration prosecutions were up 110 percent from 2004. The report released today by the AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work and the National Employment Law Project finds that immigration prosecutions rose to record levels between 2006 and 2008, at the same time as high profile raids at manufacturing plants across the country captured headlines. These immigration raids often took place during labor investigations. For example, in May 2008, the reports reveals, ICE agents arrested 389 workers in a food processing plant in Iowa while at least three other agencies were investigating serious labor violations.

Although ICE has long claimed that it focuses on employers that “egregiously violate immigration laws,” the data reveal that of 6,287 ICE arrests at workplaces in 2008, only 2.1 were of employers or employers’ agents. Usually they were of workers using either fake work authorization documents, or documents that belonged to someone else.

The report also criticizes the 287(g) program, which authorizes the federal government to deputize local law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration law. The report finds that “the program has allowed more law enforcement officers to become inappropriately, even unwittingly, involved in labor disputes on the side of employers.” The problem, the report’s authors concluded, is that local police are not bound by the same restrictions that are supposed to govern ICE agents, such as not interfering in active labor disputes. “All those protections are lost when it comes to local and state police enforcing these laws,” said Ana Avendaño, a co-author of the report from the AFL-CIO, during a press conference this morning.

The Department of Labor, for its part, has acknowledged in recent months its previous failure to adequately enforce the wage and hour laws documented by the GAO report, and says it’s on its way to correcting the problem.

“Let me be clear, there is a new sheriff in town,” Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said when she was sworn into office in mid-March. “We’ll accomplish this through tough enforcement, transparency, cooperation and balance.”

After the new GAO report in March revealed the ongoing problems in the agency, Solis quickly announced that she plans to hire 250 more wage and hour enforcement staff.

“As secretary of labor, I am committed to ensuring that every worker is paid at least the minimum wage, that those who work overtime are properly compensated, that child labor laws are strictly enforced and that every worker is provided a safe and healthful environment,” she said in late March.

This morning, Labor Department spokesman Joseph deWolk confirmed that 224 new investigators had been hired by October 13, and the rest should be on board by the end of the month.

Responding to the report, Matthew Chandler, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that DHS and ICE have changed their practices since the last administration. “In April, updated worksite enforcement guidance was distributed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which reflects a renewed Department-wide focus targeting criminal aliens and employers who cultivate illegal workplaces by breaking the country’s laws and knowingly hiring illegal workers,” Chandler said in an e-mail. “ICE focuses its resources in the worksite enforcement program on the criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly hire illegal workers in order to target the root cause of illegal immigration.”

Enforcement of the labor laws could still be stymied, however, by the fact that key individuals nominated to lead enforcement efforts in the agency still have not been confirmed by the Senate. That includes the Assistant Secretary for Occupational Health and Safety, or OSHA; the Wage and Hour Administrator; and the top lawyer for the agency, the Solicitor of Labor.

Update: This story was changed after publication for clarity.

Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings (WDCpix)

As the Senate Judiciary Committee readies for Tuesday’s vote on Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, conservative judicial activists are taking stock of the battle that demanded so much of their energy for more than two months. They don’t expect to make her the first high court nominee to go down to defeat since 1987 — a scenario that had always seemed unlikely. They do expect a majority of Republicans to oppose her, and that’s more than they had expected when the nomination was announced.

“The Republican senators did much better than I expected,” said Manny Miranda, the chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a judicial conservative umbrella group that opposed Sotomayor’s nomination largely behind the scenes.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In early June, Miranda had been bearish on the Republican conference, doubtful that it would put up a fight. He called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “limp-wristed” and organized 145 conservative activists to campaign for a filibuster of Sotomayor, which they’re not going to get. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), in announcing his opposition to the nominee, admitted that her confirmation was probably inevitable. Yet they feel like the debate over Sotomayor was as much as a conservative success as it could have possibly been, and they see a chance to give the nominee the lowest level of support from the opposition party since the bruising 1991 fight over Clarence Thomas.

“When we started, I didn’t expect more than 16 ‘no’ votes,” said Miranda. “Now I think we may go as high as 29 votes. We’ve achieved quite a lot.”

With a final vote on Sotomayor likely before the Senate leaves for its August recess, the wins and losses of the confirmation battle are becoming clearer to activists. After a few bumps in May, the attack on Sotomayor as a judicial activist who had trouble seeing past race was bolstered by a focus on her often-repeated remarks about how a “wise Latina” judge might rule in discrimination cases. An early focus on whether Sotomayor would have “empathy” for defendants cowed her, activists argue, into backing away from any hint of that. And activists credit the successful push to get the National Rifle Association to “score” the confirmation vote, forcing senators to oppose Sotomayor if they want to maintain high ratings from the group, while marshaling several senators against her.

“The NRA’s decision to score the vote is a huge statement,” said Curt Levey, director of the Committee for Justice. “They were hesitant to get involved. Even if Sotomayor is eventually confirmed, the fact that the NRA came to realize the importance of Supreme Court nominations in protecting gun rights is a very big deal. The grassroots have been activated.”

It was no sure thing that the nation’s most powerful gun rights group would oppose Sotomayor. Activists familiar with the campaign to bring it on board said that they started early, theorizing that they might need the group’s intervention to keep enough senators wavering on a vote to delay it past the recess. They argued that in the post-Heller era, Sotomayor–who wrote in 2004 that “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right”–posed a real threat to the Second Amendment. One activist speculated that both Utah senators had been brought around to vote “no” because of the NRA’s move; Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has not previously opposed a high court nominee, and Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) is facing a stiff primary challenge. Losing the NRA’s support could hurt Bennett with Republican voters. Levey and other activists are making the case to “red state” Democrats that defying the NRA this year will put their seats at risk.

The unprecedented move by the NRA has drawn some fire from supporters of President Obama’s nominee. On Monday, four Hispanic Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote an open letter to the NRA attacking the group for “evaluating Judge Sotomayor by a different standard” than previous Supreme Court nominees. But conservative critics of Sotomayor look back on the hearings and the months-long debate on the nomination and see little evidence that they did damage to their image with Hispanic voters.

“[Republicans] didn’t do to Sotomayor what Democrats did to Miguel Estrada,” said Mario H. Lopez, the president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, referring to President George W. Bush’s Washington, D.C. Circuit Court nominee who withdrew after multiple filibusters, who was cited as a sort of martyr by Republican senators during Sotomayor’s hearing. “I don’t recall anything but a respectful and serious tone of questions from these hearings.”

Conservatives spoke derisively to TWI about the early tone of the Sotomayor battle, especially Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)’s assertion that “Republicans will oppose [Sotomayor] at their peril because of “her life story on the court.” Polling suggested that Hispanics generally supported the judge — one McClatchy poll found that Hispanics, by a 24-point margin, would have preferred that Republicans backed Sotomayor — but activists claimed that the nominee didn’t inspire Hispanics the way that backers like Schumer had insisted she would.

“The backlash against Republicans for opposing her never materialized,” said Miranda, who sparked a mini-controversy in June for suggesting that Hispanics wouldn’t unanimously back the nominee because they, unlike black voters, “think like everybody else.” Sotomayor, suggested Miranda, cut a more “sophisticated” and distant pose than Estrada. “He touched a cord with the community. We [supporters of Estrada] conducted polling on this. Eighty-six percent of Hispanics believed that Miguel deserved an up-or-down vote, and 87 percent supported him.”

Republicans and activists considered Sotomayor’s rejection of a “living Constitution” or an empathy standard during her confirmation hearings a clear victory, although one that will be harder to hold Democats to. Several activists pointed to Sotomayor’s rejection of one of Obama’s concepts of justice, that a judge’s heart can take him or her “the last mile” in judging the case, as a key moment that will be used to assess and frame future nominees. “Conservatives can take heart that they really do stand with the American people,” said Mario Lopez. “That was a reflection of how fair out of the mainstream Democrats are on judicial philosophy.”

But that was largely how the people who worked to grind down Sotomayor’s nomination viewed their success. They won’t stop her. They have discovered what may and may not be able to stop a future nominee.

“The goal isn’t to defeat Sotomayor,” explained Levey. “It’s to send enough of a warning shot that future nominees won’t be as hostile to the Constitution.”

The Committee for Justice, for example, developed five ads formatted for television and newspapers, one of which compared Sotomayor’s work for the Puerto Rican Defense Fund to President Obama’s friendship with reformed Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. It got plenty of attention; people clicked through to the committee’s site, and some donated. But TV viewers won’t see that particular attack on their screens. “I don’t think the ad was effective,” Levey admitted. “We’ll run some ads in the final week, but I don’t think we’ll run that ad.”

The announcement that the administration will pursue both the criminal and military commission prosecutions is hardly a surprise, given that President Obama has said repeatedly that he intends to revive the military commissions in a new-and-improved form — providing more due process protections than the previous ones, though not enough to satisfy civil liberties groups. Still, it represents the first determination by the task force, created just after the president’s inauguration to advise him on creating a new legal framework for detention policy.

As for when the administration will seek criminal prosecutions in civilian federal courts and when it will pursue military commission trials, that remains a bit murky. After all, many of the crimes committed by alleged terrorists might qualify as both criminal acts and violations of the laws of war.

Acknowledging this, the task force seems to say that the president ought to be able to prosecute them in both places:

The President has concluded that, just as the defeat of al Qaeda will require employment of all instruments of national power—military, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic – so too must we have the ability to hold our enemies accountable for their crimes in more than one forum, namely both federal courts and military commissions. The two systems are not mutually exclusive but should instead complement one another.

As Spencer noted during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this month, who gets tried where and why is a point of serious controversy. Somehow I doubt that the task force’s preliminary proposal on the matter is going to resolve it.

It’s a moderate’s world on Capitol Hill right now, and the latest evidence arrived yesterday when the Democratic sponsors of a controversial labor-friendly proposal dropped the bill’s central tenet: A provision allowing unions to organize by getting a simple majority of workers to sign cards in support. Under current law, workers organize unions by secret ballot. The Democrats’ proposal would have given workers the additional option of a public ballot, making it easier to unionize.

The so-called “card check” bill — supported by President Obama — has been labor’s biggest legislative priority this year, prompting a fierce battle with business groups that have spent bill millions to kill the measure. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) have come out squarely in opposition to the bill, making the party’s 60-member majority irrelevant. Yesterday, those moderates won an enormous concession with the removal of the card-check provision. From The New York Times:

In its place, several Senate and labor officials said, the revised bill would require shorter unionization campaigns and faster elections.

While disappointed with the failure of card check, union leaders argued this would still be an important victory because it would give companies less time to press workers to vote against unionizing.

The move might have changed the support dynamics on Capitol Hill, but it hasn’t changed the lobbying dynamics. Indeed, labor groups are still supporting the underlying bill — the Employee Free Choice Act — while many businesses are still opposing it. The Workforce Fairness Institute, a business group formed to fight EFCA, just shot out an email announcing its continued opposition based on language that forces government arbitration when workers and employers can’t agree on a union contract.

“The most damaging aspect of the bill — the binding arbitration provision, will remain intact,” the group rued.

With Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) suffering poor health, there’s no guarantee that even the diluted proposal can win 60 Senate votes.