What's the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren't a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. "Card check," as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign '08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor's point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate--including the junior senators from New York and Illinois--to commit in writing to card check.

"When we started working on this legislation five years ago," Acuff said at Take Back America, "people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test." Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government's National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn't enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That's around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain--portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP's attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What's good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. "If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004," he argued, "John Kerry would be president."

Isn't that cozy? The unions will be spending over a third of a billion dollars to elect Democrats. Then the Democrats will pay them back by allowing them to intimidate workers into unionizing so that the unions get more dues that they can use to elect more Democrats. And all along they'll try to portray the Republicans as the party in hock to special interests!

And Obama would sign this bill in a heartbeat. He is already for it. And it would fit in with his plan to designate some companies as "Patriot Employers." He doesn't want to divide us by saying that some people are more patriotic than others, but has no qualms by defining patriotism among employers and giving them tax incentives if they perform according to the unions' mantra.

Mr Obama's plan would lower the corporate tax rate for companies that met criteria including maintaining their headquarters in the US, maintaining or increasing their US workforce relative to their overseas workforce, holding a neutral position in union drives among their employees and providing decent healthcare.

Megan McArdle outlines some of the reasons why this plan would never work.

It is basically unenforceable--all you will succeed in doing is encouraging companies to divest foreign subsidiaries and do business at arm's length, thus sacrificing whatever residual influence you had over them. America's corporate income tax is, to the great surprise of the majority of people who think of us as the "pro-business" society, one of the highest in the developed world. We also, strangely, try to collect taxes on foreign earnings from workers and companies alike, which strikes the rest of the developed world as thoroughly ridiculous. Hence, companies and people are going to work hard not to have any foreign earnings subject to tax.

The Wall Street Journal explained how this sort of attitude towards company profits misunderstands how the economy works.

Under Mr. Obama's plan, "patriot employers" qualify for a 1% tax credit on their profits. To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad.

Put another way, U.S. companies would suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate than their Chinese, Japanese and European competitors. According to research by Peter Merrill, an international tax expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, this change would "raise the cost of capital of U.S. multinationals and cause them to lose market share to foreign rivals." Apparently Mr. Obama believes that by making U.S. companies less profitable and less competitive world-wide, they will somehow be able to create more jobs in America.

He has it backwards: The offshore activities of U.S. companies tend to increase rather than reduce domestic business. A 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists from Harvard and the University of Michigan found that more foreign investment by U.S. companies leads to greater domestic investment, and that U.S. firms' hiring of more offshore workers is positively, not negatively, associated with the number of American workers they hire. That's in part because often what is produced overseas by subsidiaries are component parts to final, higher-value-added products manufactured here.

Mr. Obama is also proposing to raise tax rates on affluent individuals, as well as on capital gains and dividends. This would also lead to more capital and jobs leaving the U.S. The after-tax return on U.S. investment would fall appreciably if these tax hikes were adopted, and no amount of tax-credit subsidy will keep capital from fleeing to lower tax jurisdictions.

If the U.S. didn't impose the second highest corporate income tax rate in the world, companies would have less incentive to move jobs overseas. Rather than giving politically correct companies a 1% tax credit, it makes more sense to reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate for everyone -- by at least 10 percentage points to the global average.

Economists have long understood that companies don't really pay taxes; they merely collect them. A study by the American Enterprise Institute has shown that U.S. workers bear the cost of the corporate income tax in lower wages and salaries. To borrow Mr. Obama's language, what's really unpatriotic is the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate.

Of course, Obama also has a plan mandating that employers offer health insurance. Add in Obama's ludicrous promises about unilaterally renegotiating NAFTA and you can start to get a grasp on what the unions are buying for their third of a billion dollars.

Betsy blogs regularly at Betsy's Page