August has turned out to be a stifling month for members of Congress. Those who have dared to venture into town hall meetings have been blown back by blasts of health care hot air.

On occasion, however, other issues have cropped up in constituent meetings. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, has had a couple opportunities to address the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions.

During his town hall appearances—one at a conference of bloggers called Netroots Nation and another in Lebanon, Pennsylvania—Specter used a timeless political tactic. He told each audience what it wanted to hear while giving himself plenty of latitude.

Specter is a crucial EFCA vote. When he switched from the Republican to Democratic side of the aisle in April, speculation was rampant that he would provide the 60th vote to beat back the type of GOP filibuster that killed the measure in the previous Congress.

Instead, Specter maintained the opposition to EFCA that he announced when he was a Republican. Specter indicated that he was uncomfortable with a provision that would allow workers to authorize a union through majority sign-up instead of a secret-ballot election and another that would impose mandatory arbitration if first contract negotiations broke down.

Since Specter’s party switch, which occurred less than a month after EFCA was introduced, the measure has been stalled in Capitol Hill negotiations over a compromise. It’s not clear when—or whether—an alternative measure will emerge.

Several moderate Senate Democrats are resisting the bill over the so-called card-check provision and because they say it would impose increased costs on businesses trying to cope with the recession.

With EFCA in a precarious position, Specter’s comments before the Netroots Nation conference on August 14 took on added importance. He said that he would vote for cloture (i.e., to end a filibuster) on EFCA. A link to the video has been posted on ShopFloor.org, a blog sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers.

But what isn’t clear is whether Specter meant he would vote to end debate on EFCA as it was introduced, with the card-check and arbitration provisions, or a modified version of the bill, which he is helping negotiate.

The Specter press office hasn’t responded to my calls and e-mails for clarification. But I am pretty confident the senator meant that he would vote for cloture on a modified version. That makes perfect sense because he’s in the middle of those negotiations.

What Specter wanted to emphasize to the progressive online activists was that he was on their side on EFCA.

These folks, formerly known as liberals, are adamant about Democrats exercising their political strength and approving bills like EFCA, climate change legislation and health care reform.

They also might be inclined to support Specter’s Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Joe Sestak, who has co-sponsored EFCA. So, it’s natural that Specter told the bloggers what they wanted to hear.

But in a town hall meeting on August 11 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Specter was confronted by an opponent of EFCA. Here’s the link to the YouTube video and the commentary on ShopFloor.org.

Here we see Specter siding with an EFCA opponent. Specter indicates that he is opposed to the card-check provision. He assures the questioner that a compromise involving shortening the union election time frame will not implement elections that occur so quickly that workers don’t understand the choice in front of them.

He also foreshadows a compromise on the arbitration provision.

“We tried to work through the other facet of it, arbitration for last-best offer, but we’re bearing in mind the concerns and worries that you raised,” Specter said.

The hints that Specter is dropping about an EFCA compromise aren’t assuaging the business community, which remains fiercely opposed to the bill.

“EFCA is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be improved,” says Keith Smith, director of employment and labor policy at NAM. “There can be no compromise.”

Smith says last-best-offer arbitration doesn’t allow labor and management to come to a mutual agreement on complicated issues.

“That really reduces the collective bargaining process to a game of Russian roulette,” Smith says.

While Specter and his colleagues continue their negotiations, neither side in the EFCA battle is letting up. Shortly after Labor Day, the pro-EFCA forces are planning to renew their push to move the measure up the crowded Senate calendar.

“We’re going to see a significant uptick in the campaign to generate support for the bill,” says Josh Goldstein, spokesman for American Rights at Work. The effort will include television ads, grass-roots events and Capitol Hill lobbying.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is charging ahead to defeat the bill. It has employed the same tactics as labor—TV ads, grass-roots mobilization and Capitol Hill “fly-ins” for its supporters.

Glenn Spencer, executive director of the chamber’s Workforce Freedom Initiative, says that the barrage will continue because only about one-third of the American public is aware of EFCA.

“The more they learn about it, the less and less they like it,” Spencer says.

The fate of EFCA is unclear. But it’s a certainty that Specter and his colleagues will continue to hear a lot about the measure this fall.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is getting frustrated with reporters pressing him about whether President Barack Obama has abandoned the idea that a government-run insurance plan be included in health care reform.

Gibbs is being pummeled because Obama seemed to indicate in a weekend appearance in Colorado that the so-called public option was optional. Then on the Sunday morning television political talk shows, White House surrogates suggested the same thing.

“I got to tell you, this is one of the more curious things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Gibbs said Monday, August 17. “I was on a Sunday show, I said the same thing about a public option that I’ve said for I don’t know how many weeks.”

Gibbs is absolutely right. His boss has been dancing around the public option ever since health care reform began this spring.

“We have a goal of fostering choice and competition in a private health insurance market,” Gibbs said Tuesday, August 18. “The president prefers the public option as a way of doing that. If others have ideas, we’re open to those ideas and willing to listen to those details.”

The public option is the lightning rod of health care reform. Progressives, formerly known as liberals, call it the most important part of the legislation because they say a government plan would provide competition for private insurance.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, numbering about 81 members, is pushing back hard against a potential Obama cave-in on the public option.

Republicans monolithically oppose a public option. They say that it will lead to a government takeover of the health care system and run into the same problems that have undermined the stability of Medicare. Many in the corporate community say the public option would lure people away from employer coverage.

Obama has resolutely refused to take a position. Here’s what he said at a town hall meeting Saturday, August 15, in Grand Junction, Colorado: “The public option, whether we have it or don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Obama is acting more like a legislator, which he was in the Illinois statehouse and the U.S. Senate, than an executive. He’s hovering over the debate, ready to swoop in and align himself with the winning side rather than forge ahead with a specific prescription that might fail.

This approach contrasts sharply with what we saw from the nation’s preceding chief executive. President George W. Bush displayed a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. He fought with Congress as often as he worked with it.

On the other hand, Obama tends to appeal to all sides of a debate. When he conducts a town hall meeting, he seems to agree with everyone. What he fails to do is outline his own plan.

He talks in generalities about goals that most Democrats and Republicans share—for instance, no insurance exclusions for pre-existing conditions—and avoids any mention of sacrifices that Americans will have to make to achieve lower health care costs. Reform medicine will go down with no bitter aftertaste, Obama implies.

Obama is remaining true to his roots as a professor. He loves to analyze an issue, exploring all sides and making articulate pro and con arguments. It can be captivating. Having a cerebral president is a good thing.

But when a brainy president launches into a thinking-out-loud mode, he can find himself stepping on the toes of Capitol Hill allies rather than watching their backs.

This can create a problem when he’s dealing with the motivated and unified Republican opposition. He’ll need all the help he can get from Democratic friends he may be throwing overboard with his temporizing about the public option.

Republicans are bringing up legitimate objections to health care bills floating around the Hill. In doing so, they’re also trying to build a foundation for success in 2010.

“Many Republicans have tasted power,” Deloitte director and former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Virginia, told me in an interview earlier this year. “They’re not in a minority mode. They want to get back in the majority.”

Despite rock-bottom approval ratings, Bush had extraordinary success in bending a Democratic Congress to his will. If Obama continues to be a legislator rather than an executive, his party may not be able to keep its grip on Capitol Hill.

Discerning trends in the Capitol Hill agenda requires skill at reading between the lines.

But President Barack Obama made the timeline for immigration reform much clearer for us all in an August 10 press conference after a summit meeting with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister.

Obama acknowledged that with health care reform slowing down, energy legislation looming in the Senate and financial regulation reform hovering in the wings, it will be impossible to pass an immigration bill this year.

“Now, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” Obama said. “I would anticipate that before the year is out we will have draft legislation along with sponsors potentially in the House and the Senate who are ready to move this forward, and when we come back next year, that we should be in a position to start acting.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chair of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, will be the point person on immigration reform in Congress. He originally promised to produce a comprehensive bill by Labor Day. Now he has walked that back to offering a proposal sometime this fall.

“We’re making great progress,” he told reporters just before the Senate broke for its August recess. “I’m not setting any deadlines here.”

Employment verification will continue to twist in the wind because proponents of comprehensive reform want to save that chip for negotiations involving a path to citizenship for undocumented workers currently in the United States.

So, this fall, immigration action likely will revolve around employment verification. In September, the House and Senate must reconcile different versions of homeland security appropriations bills.

The Senate measure includes permanent reauthorization of E-Verify, the government-run electronic verification system reviled by many business groups. It also codifies a Department of Homeland Security regulation that requires all federal contractors to sign up for E-Verify.

Finally, the Senate bill would deny funding to the DHS to rescind a regulation on Social Security no-match letters that could force employers to fire workers whose information on earnings reports doesn’t align with that in government databases.

There’s a lot to sort out in the homeland appropriations legislation, but not nearly as much as in health care reform. Both the House and Senate missed their goals of passing health care bills before the summer break.

That pushes the big battles into the fall. On your scorecard, note that the most important action will occur in the Senate Finance Committee. For now, it is looking like the last hope for a bipartisan bill.

Three Democrats, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and three Republicans, led by the ranking Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been working for weeks on a bill. Grinding out consensus means that controversial provisions—such as a public insurance option and an employer mandate—will likely fall by the wayside.

But such an outcome will enrage liberal Democrats who have staked their claim in health care reform on establishing a public option—and, to a lesser extent, an employer mandate—like the ones in House legislation and the measure produced by Senate health committee.

The business community is hoping for the bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to produce a palatable bill.

“The Finance Committee is closer to getting it right than any other plan that exists right now,” said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a group representing chief executives of some of the largest U.S. corporations. “If they are successful, will the president support their version of reform?”

That’s probably the most important question in the health care debate. Those participating in the negotiations were optimistic but circumspect before the Senate headed home for August.

“We’re making steady progress and doing this in a very professional way,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota.

Finally, in negotiations on another bill important to Workforce Management readers, the principals aren’t providing much guidance on developments. The Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions, has been stalled for months because of a lack of support among moderate Democrats in the Senate.

Schumer also is a player on this bill. He is one of the senators trying to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy his colleagues who believe that the bill would hurt businesses struggling to survive the recession.

“There’s a group of people working on it, and we’re making great progress,” Schumer said.

Reading between the lines, it looks as if predictions that the Senate won’t act on EFCA this year may be right. But keep an eye on the measure. The exhilarating and frustrating thing about Capitol Hill is that conventional wisdom is consistently overturned.

Post-election jubilation among Democrats last fall as they achieved huge House and Senate majorities is melting into the reality of governing during the dog days of summer.

The House has already departed Washington to begin its summer recess. The Senate’s break is set to begin on Friday, August 7.

Each chamber has missed the deadline set by President Barack Obama to pass health care reform bills before leaving town for their summer getaways. The delay can be attributed in part to Republican resistance and to fissures within the Democratic Party.

In order to achieve their majorities, Democrats wisely extended their tent. The head of their House campaign arm in 2006—Rahm Emanuel, who is now White House chief of staff—recruited moderates who could win conservative-leaning districts. Many of those victors became members of the Blue Dog Coalition.

Now the Blue Dogs are barking on health care legislation. Several of them who sit on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were successful in getting the panel to include amendments that would lower the cost of the measure and allow negotiated reimbursement rates in a government-run insurance option, rather than setting them based on Medicare rates.

Their intervention inflamed House progressives—formerly known as liberals. Just before the House broke for recess, 57 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, asserting that the Energy and Commerce agreement would reduce subsidies for the poor and middle class.

“In short, this agreement will result in the public, both as insurance purchasers and as taxpayers, paying ever higher rates to insurance companies,” the letter states.

Moderate and liberal Democrats will now have to wrestle a final House bill to the ground. The commerce, labor and tax committees have approved measures with varying kinds of employer mandates and public options.

In a July 30 press conference, which was held outdoors despite 90-degree temperatures and high humidity, leaders of the progressive Democrats warned that they would oppose what they called a watered-down bill.

“We want a plan with a meaningful public option,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California and a former HR professional. “We can compromise no more.”

She and her colleagues were occasionally drowned out by protestors chanting for a single-payer government health care system. Some progressives support such a plan, but congressional leadership has ruled it out. Nonetheless, opponents of the public option call it the first step on a slippery slope to government-run health care.

Over in the Senate, health care reform also is in flux. The health committee has approved a bill with an employer mandate and a public option, while the Finance Committee is trying to cobble together a bill with bipartisan support that would jettison each idea.

Reconciling those two bills—once Finance has introduced and approved its version—is going to be a big challenge, if Democrats want to attract more than token GOP support and ensure that their own moderates stay on board.

The rising tension was illustrated in a July 30 Senate press conference. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, dropped all senatorial courtesy in answering a question posed by my Crain Communications colleague Matthew DoBias of Modern Healthcare.

DoBias asked a legitimate question: How will the two Senate committees be able to bridge the differences between divergent bills? The answer, which will unfold over the fall, may determine the outcome of health care reform.

Reid took umbrage. “With all due respect,” Reid said, pausing and casting an icy stare at DoBias, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. These are not two separate products.”

But then Reid seemed to endorse the premise of DoBias’ query with the rest of his answer about how he is going to merge the bills.

“I’m going to do it very carefully, recognizing we have to have 60 votes,” Reid said. “I’d like to have a few more than that.”

There are a total of 60 Democrats in the Senate, just enough to overcome a filibuster. Getting that number of votes—and 218 in the House—will be as much a test of Democrats’ ability to line up their colleagues as it is to attract Republicans.