While the labor lobby is certainly justified in claiming a moral victory in moving the Employee Free Choice Act through the House of Representatives and in enlisting 47 U.S. Senators to sign on as sponsors of the legislation, its leaders are misstating the significance of the 51 votes garnered in favor of cloture. 

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney is quoted in the New York Times as saying:

“Today’s vote shows that a majority of the United States Senate supports changing the law to restore working people’s freedom to make their own choice to join a union and bargain for a better life.”

The Change to Win website announced:

Today, a majority of the U.S. Senate joined a large, bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives in standing with American workers and their families by voting for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would enable workers to freely choose whether or not to join a union without being subjected to strong-arm tactics used by their employers.

Of course, contrary to these assertios, a vote for cloture is not a vote for the bill.  It is simply a vote to send the measure to the floor for a vote on the merits.  The 51 votes in favor of cloture included 50 members of the Democratic caucus and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA).  One can assume that Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and the 46 co-sponsors would have eventually voted for the bill.  Although Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) did not co-sponsor the bill, he recently announced his support for it.  And Senator Specter may have been leaning toward supporting some version of the bill.  That would make 49 Senate votes for passage.  But three of the Democrats who voted for cloture -- Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO), and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) -- were not co-sponsors and do not appear to have ever made a public commitment to vote for the bill.  

The Northwest Arkansas Morning News reported on June 8, 2007 that Senator Lincoln was not yet a supporter of the bill, even though she would vote for cloture:

Lincoln was in Washington, during Friday's demonstration at her Little Rock office. Lincoln spokeswoman Donna Kay Yeargan said the senator had not decided whether she would support the bill but had decided to vote for cloture on the measure, a procedure in which the Senate votes to place a time limit on consideration of a bill.

On June 19, 2007 -- one week before the cloture vote -- the pro-labor blog Daily Kos wrote:

I'm writing for folks like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln -- two good Democratic senators who have yet to commit to voting for EFCA.

And on June 22, 2007, the Denver Post observed that labor was not yet convinced that it had the support of Senator Salazar:  

On Thursday, union members engaged in street theater in downtown Denver to put pressure on Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., to vote for the act.

Make no mistake about it -- lining up 49 votes in the United States Senate is quite an accomplishment.  And maybe labor could have ultimately won the support of two of the three Democratic holdouts.  But surely Mr. Sweeney and his colleagues know that 51 votes for cloture doesn’t necessarily mean that the bill would have passed in an up or down vote.