Michael Whitney at Work In Progress has already hit this, but I just want to look at the timeline here.

• Craig Becker is nominated to the National Labor Relations Board last April. There are two missing seats on the Board, making it non-functioning. A deal is struck to move them all together, filling out the board and getting Democrats a 3-2 majority, as is normal for the party in power.

• Republicans spend months obstructing Becker’s appointment, saying that his work for SEIU and the AFL-CIO make him a tool for Big Labor and that he’d somehow get the Employee Free Choice Act enacted without Congressional approval or something. John McCain puts a hold on Becker.

• Democrats pick up a 60-seat voting majority by September, when Paul Kirk is sworn in, and presumably have the votes at that point to move the Becker nomination. But the Senate is focused on health care and don’t want to take the time to break a filibuster, and Becker, along with a number of other nominees, remain in limbo. In fact, Becker in among a handful that get sent back to the White House at the end of the year.

• The White House re-nominates Becker, and he has to go through the committee process all over again.

• Yesterday was the hearing, and Tom Harkin signals his intention to vote Becker out of committee on Thursday morning.

• Republicans, saying that they would commit to all-out war if that happens, roust out Scott Brown from shuffling request for new nude model spreads and tell him to demand to be seated tomorrow, giving Republicans a 41st vote to block Becker’s appointment.

Now, read that entire timeline again, consider that Republicans took about 6 months to allow Al Franken to be seated in Minnesota, recognize that Obama just today excoriated Republicans for obstructing all of his appointments, and then steel yourself for the punch line:

Sen.-elect Scott Brown (R), the successor to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), will be sworn in to office Thursday afternoon, giving Republicans 41 seats in the upper chamber.

“Once we get his certificate, we expect to swear him in tomorrow afternoon as early as 5 o’clock, which is earlier than he suggested,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), in an interview Wednesday.

A senior GOP aide said he expected Brown to be sworn in around 5 p.m. on Thursday although a precise time has not yet been set.

I guess Democrats are lucky, in a sense. Brown could have told Obama to start packing and be out of the White House by the weekend.

Let’s look for the silver lining. The National Labor Relations Board will still be crippled and unable to act, meaning that the nation’s workers will continue to have practically no redress for labor violations.

That’s good for someone, right?