Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has announced his intention to alter the process by which Senate committee chairmen are elected.  Maintaining that “it’s not even a vote” due to senators’ fear of publicly objecting to a candidate, Sen. Brown is pushing his fellow Democrats to use a secret ballot in the process.  This would revolutionize upcoming chairmanship battles, as senior committee members would have to actively lobby their peers—whose votes would remain anonymous—for the position.

While secret ballots are a pillar of the democratic electoral process, it is interesting to note that Sen. Brown doesn’t think that everyone should have the same privacy.  Taking a wildly incongruous stance toward the American worker, Brown has been quite vocal in his support for the dreadfully mis-named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would force public ballots upon laborers voting for or against unionization.  This is the devious initiative known as Card Check.  Apart from overriding state laws and handing even more power to radicals in the current administration, Card Check would open a door for large-scale voter intimidation, a tactic often used by union bosses to supplement their dwindling membership.

It seems as if, in Brown’s mind, the freedom to vote as one wishes should be held only by people like himself: we are all equals, but some are more equal than others.  Of course, there’s an unsurprising explanation for his position: in the last election cycle, Brown received almost $700,000 in political donations from labor unions and their PACs.  This is par for the course.  As we’ve covered in the past, Big Labor pays the way for politicians who will serve their interests, not those of the workers themselves.  The only difference here is that these politicians aren’t usually as transparent in their pandering as Sen. Brown.

Want to learn more about Card Check? Click here for a scary little game by the Alliance for Worker Freedom.