Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) is embarrassed (and he should be). In a recent conference call with bloggers, he explained that House leaders are holding up passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to “kowtow” to the labor movement’s demand for “card check.” Here’s a snippet that Carter Wood over at ShopFloor transcribed:

Let me just say bottom line, I’ve never seen anything that’s just so brazenly a genuflect, if you will, by House leadership to unions. Card check, to me, it’s hard for me to believe that people really believe in this country that card check is a good thing, where basically union leaders go out and one on one should pick people off to bring a union into existence in companies. I’ve experienced first hand some of those types of tactics. Years ago, as a young man, I was a card-carrying union member. And again, it’s hard for me to see…it’s hard for me understand the tremendous tilt that this leadership has toward the unions. But this Colombia free trade agreement is absolutely inflicting pain on the very people that are being represented.

Today, per the Andean free trade preference agreement, Colombia can ship goods into our country tariff-free, for the most part. Very few things have tariffs on them. This agreement would allow us, our employees, our companies, our workers here in America to ship goods to Colombia tariff-free.

This is solely, solely bowing to union pressure. To me it’s an embarrassment to our country. This president has been our friend; Colombia as a country has been our friend in a part of the world where we need friends, where we need people who care about democracy, who care about freedom, who care about commerce, who want to be stable contributors, if you will, to the world. He has done that, and here we are, holding him hostage, holding their country hostage, holding our workers in this country hostage to the fact that the AFL-CIO and other unions are trying to lever this to some other end. I really mean it. I have never seen anything so blatant, so blatant of nothing, if you will, of kowtowing to union officials in our country.

You can listen to the entire conference call (thanks to NAM).