At the beginning of Obama's term, big business was feeling a little apprehensive. Given the new president's broad mandate and the large Democratic majorities in Congress, it looked as though he might be able to push through a wave of progressive legislation to match LBJ's Great Society. The most unnerving of all these potential pieces of legislation was a bill that would balance the playing field between workers and management by making union organization simpler: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Big business freaked out, responding with biblical rhetoric and hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads. But now, a year, later it looks as though they needn't have worried themselves. EFCA's momentum halted as the debate shifted entirely to healthcare reform and, as Harold Meyerson pointed out last week, the Coakley debacle sealed its fate.

But most political observers had given it up for dead months earlier. Despite the fact that the bill passed the House by a large majority in the 110th Congress (only two Democrats voted against it, and thirteen Republicans voted for), it was ominously never brought up to a vote in the 111th Congress. As a House aide on the labor committee explained to me, they wanted the Senate to pass it before they put their members out there again on a controversial vote—good luck with that. (Senate centrists waffled until the health care overwhelmed the EFCA debate.)

EFCA's death isn't terribly surprising. Labor law reform has a list of legislative failures almost as long as health care reform's history of political defeat. FDR and the massive Democratic majorities of the 1930s were able to significantly change America's labor law system for the better. Everyone else who has tried, has failed. Truman's veto of the viciously anti-union Taft-Hartley Act was defeated by an alliance of Congressional conservatives in both parties. LBJ's legislative winning streak was ended by a Republican filibuster (again backed by conservative Dems) in 1965 when he tried to ameliorate some of the harsher effects of that bill. Carter and Clinton's efforts were both ended by a similar alliance, using similar tools: namely the arcane, anti-majoritarian rules of the Senate. Now EFCA has succumbed to those same forces. Some things never change.