The Wall Street Journal today sounds the alarm on another ghastly power grab by Big Labor – a bill being pushed by congressional liberals that would require state and local police and firefighters to submit to collective bargaining. The bill, which is scheduled to be voted on in the Senate this week, would make top union officials at local unions the sole bargaining agents for police and firefighters in every community with a population exceeding 5,000. Currently, states have the ability to set their own policies with respect to public workers. This bill would replace every state law with one written in Washington. 

There is growing concern over the rising cost of food and today on Capitol Hill the Joint Economic Committee will be hearing from experts as to the causes. 

A couple of interesting items on the energy front. First, an editorial in today’s Investor’s Business Daily applauds the President for “lambasting lawmakers for fiddling while the energy crisis burns,” adding that it was a “well deserved takedown of do-nothing lawmakers.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel sounds the alarm about Big Labor’s agenda and what they are willing to spend on politics to see that it becomes a reality.  A good friend of Freedom’s Watch, the National Right to Work Committee’s Mark Mix, says that for the union bosses 2008 represents an “all-in” bet.  And Big Labor’s stack of chips is substantial.

Robert Novak reports on how Democrats in Congress are ready to humiliate America’s strongest ally in Latin America, Colombia, in order to mollify the Big Labor Bosses .  President Bush will next week send to Congress for approval the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, the product of intense negotiation that met many of the objections of Democrats in Congress on labor and environmental issues.  Indeed, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said she is willing to go even further by adding provisions to help workers displaced by trade.  It is still not enough for Big Labor, and this has put House Democrats in a quandary.  Reports Novak:

The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW) yesterday released statewide polls taken in Minnesota, Colorado, and Maine that are bad news for the pet legislative project of the Big Labor bosses – replacing secret ballot union elections with a card check system.  All three polls show that by large margins voters in those three states support maintaining private ballots for workers during elections on whether to join a union.  A CDW press release delivers the bad news to Big Labor:

In last night’s Democrat debate, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton discussed their positions on driver’s licenses for illegal aliens.  Clinton offered perhaps the most bizarre rationale for her opposition (for now, anyway) to letting illegal aliens have a license, saying: