With cap-and-trade hitting the skids and health care in disarray, we haven’t heard much about the Free Employee Choice Act lately. Periodically, Tom Harkin pops up to declare a “compromise” pending, but we never see much evidence of it. There may be a reason for that. The latest Rasmussen poll shows just how unpopular its central plank, card check, is:

Thirty percent (30%) of Americans say it is fair to form a union without having a secret ballot vote if a majority of a company’s workers sign a card saying they want to unionize.

But a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of adults do not believe it is fair to form a union without a secret vote. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure.

Sixty-five percent (65%) of Republicans believe it’s unfair to establish a union without a secret ballot. Democrats and adults not affiliated with either party are more closely divided, although pluralities of both groups agree with the majority of Republicans.

And perhaps that is why organized labor is now making health care its No. 1 priority. Certainly, the president and Congress have more important priorities. After all, when unemployment was under 8% back in January, Obama was telling the Washington Post that “If we’re losing half a million jobs a month, then there are no jobs to unionize, so my focus first is on those key economic priority items.”

Perhaps a crippling economic crisis was not the opening liberals initially considered it to be for springing their agenda on America. Some ideas actually sound worse when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs each month. Taking away the secret ballot and imposing union contracts by mandatory arbitration are two such ideas that come to mind.