Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) — one of President Barack Obama’s top allies in the Senate — acknowledged Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the “card check” labor bill may not have the 60 votes needed to get out of the Senate.
“I’m not sure we have the votes” to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, McCaskill said Sunday.
The bill, which would make it easier to organize unions, is one of the more controversial pieces of legislation that the administration is expected to take up early on this year.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and other business interests have spent millions of lobbying and advertising dollars to oppose the bill.
McCaskill also sought to defend the fact that she and Obama support a massive omnibus spending bill that includes thousands of earmarks despite their shared opposition to the practice.
“I’ve voted to remove earmarks any chance I can, so long as it’s stripping out all of them,” she said.
Last week, McCaskill voted against an amendment to the omnibus spending bill that would have eliminated 13 provisions associated with the lobbying firm PMA Group, which is believed to be under a federal investigation for possible campaign finance violations.
Meanwhile, Republicans continued to abandon efforts to at least appear as if they are aligned with the new administration, with House and Senate Republicans leveling harsh criticism against Obama’s economic policies.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued that the administration has failed to make difficult choices on a number of issues and that the White House must allow some of the banks hit by the financial crisis to fail.
“I don’t think they’ve made the tough decisions. You’ve got to let some of these banks fail,” he said.
Likewise, McCain said that despite his popularity, Obama has taken the wrong track on the budget. “I think he’s working hard. I think he still has the support of the majority of voters. [But] I think he’s made a very serious mistake with this budget.”
Appearing on “Face the Nation,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) also sought to tie the continuing collapse of the stock market to Obama’s actions as president.
“When you look at what’s happened on Wall Street the last six weeks, the reason the market continues to go down is because many people on Wall Street don’t think the policies of the president will work,” he said. “At the end of the day I think we needed to do a stimulus bill, but I’ve got concerns that all it will do is grow the size of government and put a lot of debt on our kids and really won’t stimulate the economy, and I think Wall Street is saying the same thing.”
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