THE Hill newspaper Roll Call (which is part of The Economist Group)reports that the Employee Free Choice Act might be dead this year, and its chances are unlikely to improve all that much in 2011. Tom Harkin, a Democratic senator from Iowa, gives the rundown.

We’ve got the healthcare bill; we’ve got appropriations bills, and we’re lacking two senators that we need right now. Nothing is happening on that right now.

If the health-care bill stalls, historians will look back on the summer of 2009 and wonder: Why didn't the Democrats focus on this? Why were so many weeks spent trying to suss out support for "card check", something that the party generally supports but hardly a reason it won in 2008? Why did cap-and-trade legislation come to the floor before health-care reform?

In both instances, wavering Democrats, many from states and districts where some political distance from the president is a nice thing to have, were cajoled into taking stands that would hurt them at the polls. The pressure added up; it became much braver to support a broadly written health-care reform bill. The party failed to push back against its interest groups. In retrospect, the cap-and-trade vote may be remembered like the Republicans' 2005 vote to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo—as the moment they blew their political capital to appease their base.