Today, the Senate will begin considering the Employee Free Choice Act. The Change To Win and AFL-CIO federations are joining together to turn out people to a rally in Washington, D.C. and many other events around the country. IF YOU HAVE VIDEO OF THESE EVENTS, POST IT VIA OUR WORKINGLIFE TV SITE.

In the past few days, I’ve had my trusty intern, Hugh Williams, try to get an update on the four Democratic Senators who refuse to co-sponsor EFCA: Sens. Blanche Lincoln and David Pryor of Arkansas, Ken Salazar of Colorado and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. We all know that EFCA is going nowhere–there is less than a zero chance that 60 senators will vote to stop a planned Republican filibuster. The legislation is dead as a door nail. But, that doesn’t mean that these four Democrats should be let off the hook. Here’s what we learned–

Nothing. Yup, none of the four offices would respond to our queries other than a vague “she hasn’t released a statement” from Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s office. These four Dems are running and hiding. I’d hope that the two federations would publicly take these folks on for refusing to publicly support the bill. Certainly, all eyes will be on the four when it comes to voting to end the Republican filibuster. Voting to let debate continue is not the same thing as co-sponsoring the bill. In one sense, a specific vote is more important. On the other hand, the vote is a cop-out in this case because everyone knows that having all 49 Democrats and Joe Lieberman voting to end debate (Sen. Tim Johnson is still not well enough to cast votes) will mean very little since there will not be 10 Republicans (will there be one?) who will vote to choke off the Republican filibuster. So, it’s a freebie vote.

Don’t let these four slide.

[note: there is some time stamp problem on my blog posts which we are trying to figure out. This was actually posted Tuesday morning, not monday!!!]