As the Obama presidency moves from the feel-good optimism of a campaign victory to the nitty-gritty of actually governing, some Democratic voices are starting to speak up and question whether we should pass EFCA so quickly. True, these are not Senators or Representatives, the people whose votes will actually matter. But at least two op-eds in major newspapers over the past week from Democrats have broken from the party line. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent piece by Ariella Bernstein. Ms. Bernstein is a former employee at both FMCS and the NLRB. Her op-ed clearly shows that she has a lot of inside knowledge about how the agencies work. Bernstein’s point was that the NLRB and FMCS have a lot of hidden data that – if opened to the public – could shed light on many of the union claims about organizing and negotiating first contracts. She recommends that we hold off on EFCA until we have properly mined this data. While we are convinced that EFCA is a bad bill new data or not, her idea still has a lot of merit. Isn’t Congress supposed to be a deliberative body? Aren’t they supposed to crunch all of the numbers and make sure that the bills they pass make sense? Why the rush in the first 100 days to pass EFCA? Of course the answer to that question is that organized labor has no interest in more data. In fact, there is a possibility that the data Ms. Bernstein writes about will demonstrate even more dramatically that EFCA is bad public policy. Yet, if some moderate Democrats who are uneasy with the bill want a compromise, this might be a good one. Let’s maybe open up all of the books at the NLRB, FMCS, DOL, etc. and really intensively study the issues involved in EFCA. Then, we can propose labor reform based on the results of those investigations. Right now, we are taking the union’s word about what’s wrong without any objective data, discussion, or debate. Bernstein isn’t alone in her EFCA skepticism. Froma Harrop, a nationally syndicated columnist and middle of the road Democrat, devoted her entire column last week to EFCA. She gets right down to business: “The first campaign promise Barack Obama should break is to push through the Employee Free Choice Act. That harmless sounding piece of legislation would let union organizers do an end run around secret-ballot elections: Companies would have to recognize a union if most workers signed cards in support of it. We’re not children here. We know how those majorities can be reached. There’s repeated harassment, bullying and more inventive tactics, such as getting workers drunk, then sliding sign-up cards under their noses.” Both Ms. Bernstein and Ms. Harrop deserve enormous credit for speaking out publicly against EFCA. Let’s just hope that the people in Washington, DC who will be actually casting votes listen to these sensible Democrats.