After a Business and Industry Association debate at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, the Granite Staters for Employee Freedom tried to get a straight answer from Jeanne Shaheen on whether she supports a worker’s right to a private ballot in the workplace.  Take a look at 1:22 in the video below - before the cameraman can get the question out, a police officer accosts him and informs him that Jeanne Shaheen doesn’t want to talk.  Is it now policy to use the police as a barrier between politicians and uncomfortable questions?

At a Chamber of Commerce forum in Portsmouth, NH, Jeanne Shaheen had yet another opportunity to defend her support of the Employee Free Choice Act, and again she she chose to attack the questioner rather than answer the question.

From the PolitickerNJ:

After Lautenberg gave his pro-union stump speech to around 100 union members, he tried to engage a reportedly agitated Capasso in a discussion outside the union hall. The debate became heated when Capasso accused Lautenberg of taking work away from his union members, and Lautenberg responding that he fought in World War II to protect the rights that union members now enjoy. Both parties dropped a few expletives - nothing out of the ordinary for a political event in Bayonne. At one point, Steve Lenox, Lautenberg’s state director (and a former AFL-CIO staffer) needed to get between the octogenarian Senator and the union leader to make sure the argument did not escalate into a fist fight in front of about a dozen union members captivated by the debate.

Even as newspapers and columnists around the country like the Sun Sentinel in Florida, the Washington Post in Washington D.C. and our own Oregonian deride the act, Jeff Merkley supports it.

Even as bloggers, the new media for politics in the United States, point out the major flaws and hypocrisy with this grossly mis-named act, Jeff Merkley supports it.

Even as members of his own party, liberal icons like George McGovern speak out against it as being un-democratic, Jeff Merkley supports it.

Even though a survey shows that 94% of Oregonians believe employees should have the right to vote on forming a union by a private ballot election where each individual’s vote is kept private, Jeff Merkley supports it.

If you follow the money, the answer seems pretty clear: Big Labor Unions and the Union Bosses are contributing tens of thousands to Merkley’s campaign. Would you care to guess what the Big Labor Unions #1 priority is for Congress next year? You’re right: Passing the Employee Free Choice Act. You can bet that the people they supported will need to support their #1 priority.

Which all means that Big Labor, not Oregonians, are Jeff Merkley’s #1 priority.

This ad challenging DFL Chairman Brian Melendez and Al Franken to, once and for all, debate us on EFCA, ran today in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The continuing refusal of liberal supporters of EFCA to actually debate the issue stands in stark contrast to former Senator George McGovern’s courage on this issue. 

Senator McGovern, a principled liberal, understands the issue clearly and has the courage to tell the truth.  At a time when our political process could use a few elder statesmen in both parties, it found one in George McGovern.

While we certainly don’t expect Al Franken and Brian Melendez to repudiate their support for EFCA, they could follow the lead of Senator McGovern and reasonably debate the issue in a public forum rather than resort to name calling and legal shenanigans.