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As a labor dispute threatens to shut down the National Football League next season, the two sides are moving the game to a new playing field: Capitol Hill.

The union that represents pro football players has hired a coterie of new lobbyists and public-relations officials in recent months to help make its case to Congress that the NFL owners are acting unfairly in labor talks. The NFL Players Association and its backers say lawmakers can step in because of a congressional antitrust exemption that allows the league to negotiate lucrative broadcast rights.

The lobbying efforts include visits scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday by more than 30 players and their families, who will meet with lawmakers and legislative staffers. The players plan to emphasize the potential economic impact that an NFL shutdown could have on local communities, according to union officials.

“The most important thing that can happen for us on Capitol Hill is to just level the playing field,” Domonique Foxworth, a Baltimore Ravens cornerback and a member of the NFLPA’s Executive Committee, said in a recent conference call with reporters, noting that the NFL “has been lobbying on Capitol Hill for a number of years now.”

“It’s important that they see our faces too and realize another team is also playing in the game,” Foxworth added.

But the NFL, which has its own sizable lobbying operation in Washington, says Congress should stay out of what amounts to a private-sector business negotiation.

“This deal will be reached at the negotiating table, not in the halls of Congress,” said chief NFL lobbyist Jeff Miller, a former counsel to Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.). “We don’t think a third-party intervention, whether it’s for Congress or anyone else, helps you get a deal here.”

The current labor deal between the NFL and the union expires in March, and players say they expect a work stoppage, initiated by the owners, if a deal isn’t reached. Both sides have been jockeying for leverage and public-relations points in recent weeks, with the main sticking points being a demand by owners to cut back salaries by about $1 billion league-wide and add two games to the season.

One strategy available to players is to decertify the union, which could keep them from being locked out and expose the league to an antitrust lawsuit. Under the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, the NFL is allowed to ignore antitrust laws in negotiating a television package for the league at large, but the courts have rejected NFL attempts to broaden the exception to other areas.

Some lawmakers, including former senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, have toyed with the idea of rescinding the NFL’s exemption. But Congress in general has been reluctant to get involved in labor disputes pitting two unsympathetic parties – millionaire players and billionaire owners – against each other.

The NFL’s lobbying expenditures are expected to exceed $1.5 million in 2010, including payments to Democratic-leaning firms Elmendorf Strategies and Glover Park Group, according to records and officials. The league’s political-action committee also showered more than $600,000 in contributions to members of both parties in the 2010 cycle, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finances.

The players association does not have a PAC and only spends about a third as much on lobbying as the league. But the union has been attempting to close the gap in recent months, hiring Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock to join its main lobbying firm, Patton Boggs. The players association has also enlisted the help of Singer Bonjean Strategies, a bipartisan public-relations firm with close ties to Congress.

Over the past year, the union has organized scores of visits to Capitol Hill by players and other representatives, and is circulating letters to be signed by lawmakers urging the league to cut a better deal for players. The powerful AFL-CIO union also weighed in with a letter last fall to team owners.

Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita said Congress has an interest in the NFL labor dispute because of the potential damage to local economies if there is a lockout. The players association claims a shutdown would cost each NFL city $160 million in lost business, a figure that the league and some outside analysts say is inflated.

Fujita said many football cities such as Cleveland are already struggling amid the economic downturn. “To lose out on the money that would come in from an NFL season, it’s going to be devastating,” he said. “So from that standpoint it is the government’s business and I think it is important for them to be involved.”

But Miller, the NFL lobbyist, said the league will push back with its own message that Congress has no business interfering with the labor talks.

“We’re not looking to ask Congress to be involved, but we can’t abdicate the playing field,” Miller said. “Our effort is going to be to make sure that members of Congress are aware of our point of view.”

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John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated Press Demonstrators derided Republican state representatives with shouts of “Shame!” as the officials left the Assembly room of the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison after passing a controversial budget bill Thursday.

The votes late this week by the Wisconsin Legislature to curtail collective bargaining rights appears to hand political victories to two very different men: Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, and President Obama.

After a three-week stalemate, Republicans in the state found a procedural way to force Mr. Walker’s signature measure through the legislature despite the absence of the Democrats in the state senate. Mr. Walker has vowed to sign the bill over the objections of the unions and the Democrats.

But in the process Mr. Walker has done for Mr. Obama an unintended favor. He has energized labor unions, a major part of the president’s political base and one that will play a big role in whether or not Mr. Obama is re-elected.

It was always clear that the president’s political team would have to find a way to motivate union voters in 2012. In many states, labor unions provide the money and manpower for voter turnout operations that are significant for Democratic politicians.

Labor unions turned out in big numbers for Mr. Obama in 2008. But since his election, the president has been a disappointment to many union voters, in particular because he has not made their No. 1 legislative issue — secret balloting for union organizing — a top priority.

Even worse, in the eyes of some union leaders and workers, was Mr. Obama’s decision to pursue a more centrist agenda and to embrace the United States Chamber of Commerce in the wake of the midterm elections last year.

The danger for Mr. Obama was not that labor unions would fail to support him in 2012; the danger was that they would not support him enthusiastically, that their passions for him from four years ago would fade. That could translate into difficulty for Mr. Obama, especially in crucial states where union membership is high and presidential politics is competitive.

Were it not for the battle in Wisconsin, Mr. Obama would have faced a difficult task: how to fire up the union voters without alienating the independents he is clearly trying to court; how to win back the left in general while embracing a more centrist, pragmatic agenda and seeking a more cooperative relationship with Republicans in Washington.

But Mr. Walker, by sparking the Wisconsin fight over collective bargaining, may have awoken a sleeping giant, not only in his state but also across the nation.

In a speech on Thursday in Washington, Richard L. Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., made it clear that losing the fight in Wisconsin was a galvanizing moment for labor unions that will likely benefit the president at the polls next year.

“Thank you, Scott Walker,” Mr. Trumka said in the speech at the National Press Club. “We should have invited him here today to receive the Mobilizer of the Year award! Because Governor Walker’s overreaching has brought us to this moment to talk about jobs. This is the debate we’ve wanted to have. Well, guess what? Suddenly the debate came to us, and we’re winning.”

Mr. Trumka promised to help “channel this Midwest uprising” into a benefit for the middle class and union workers.

“This is a bottom-up, grass-roots movement with its own momentum — a true spontaneous outcry against our disastrous winner-take-all political culture,” he said.

Still, there are always risks in politics, and Mr. Walker and Mr. Obama both have to worry about the forces that have been unleashed on their behalf.

In Wisconsin, the anger from union workers has already prompted calls for recall elections for Republican senators and for Mr. Walker. If those efforts were to succeed, it could set back the Republican Party’s victories in a state where its progress has been a long time coming.

And Mr. Obama must walk a fine line during the next 18 months as he encourages and nurtures the motivations of union workers while not appearing to be too much a part of their effort. So far, the president and the White House have been careful to express support for the union workers without becoming their full-blown champion.

After the Wisconsin Legislature passed the bill, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, issued just such a statement.

“The actions taken last night, which divorced the issue of the state’s budget problems from the issue of the rights of public sector employees, pretty clearly showed that the actions were not following the principle that we need to all come together and work together and not denigrate or vilify public sector employees, but bring them into the process,” Mr. Carney said.

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President Obama and his political rivals in Washington have jumped into the epic battle in Wisconsin between organized labor and the state’s newly elected Republican governor over the rights and benefits of state workers.

Efforts by Scott Walker, the state’s Republican governor, to slash collective-bargaining rights of public employees prompted days of protests at the state capitol by thousands of union workers, fueled and organized in part by Mr. Obama’s own political apparatus in Washington.

Even as Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin fled their own state in an attempt to stall a vote in the Republican-controlled state senate, Mr. Obama decried the tactics of Mr. Walker as “an assault on unions.”

That prompted House Speaker John Boehner to rip into Mr. Obama, accusing him of having “unleashed the Democratic National Committee to spread disinformation and confusion in Wisconsin.”

Mr. Boehner, in a statement, praised Mr. Walker and other Republican governors for making the tough decisions to cut spending. And he chided the president for siding with the wrong side in the contentious Wisconsin debate.

“Rather than shouting down those in office who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the president and his advisers should lead. Until they do, they are not focusing on jobs, and they are not listening to the American people who put them in power.”

The sharp-edged retorts from Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner reflect the broader debate in the nation’s capital as Democrats and Republicans dig in to rigid positions about spending, investment, the deficit and changes to entitlement programs.

In the next two weeks, Democrats and Republicans in Washington are set to play a game of chicken with the federal budget. The government’s authority to spend money runs out on March 4 and could force a shutdown in federal services unless the parties can agree on a new spending plan.

But despite recent calls for bipartisanship and promises to work together in Washington, the standoff in Wisconsin is a preview of how easily discussions could disintegrate into chaos.

For Mr. Boehner, the Wisconsin debate is another opportunity to preach a message of fiscal restraint in the face of demanding unions and government employees. Republican governors in several states, including Wisconsin, have said they must make drastic cuts to deal with huge budget problems.

By jumping quickly to condemn Mr. Obama’s comments, Mr. Boehner explicitly questioned the president’s leadership, suggesting he is unwilling to make the deep sacrifices necessary to put the country on the right fiscal path.

Other Republicans, too, see opportunity in the imagery coming out of Wisconsin. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is trying to head off a primary challenge from the Tea Party in his state, praised Mr. Walker and other Republican governors for making “tough choices” in their budgets.

“It is too bad that Washington Democrats are attacking them rather than following their lead,” Mr. Hatch said on Thursday. “President Obama’s comments today were, frankly, way off base. The only assault is from a bunch of self-interested government union employees who are putting their interests ahead of the interests of the Wisconsin taxpayers who have been funding their runaway spending.”

He added: “This is not the way public servants should behave.”

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the budget committee in the House, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.”

For Mr. Obama and the Democrats, the Wisconsin debate provides an opportunity to stand by their supporters in organized labor in a part of the country that is likely to be an important battleground during the 2012 presidential election campaign.

It also allows Democrats to once again raise questions about Mr. Boehner’s willingness to see government jobs lost.

This week, Democrats seized on Mr. Boehner’s comment that if government jobs were lost because of the cuts that Republicans are calling for, then “so be it.” Democrats now view the situation in Wisconsin as another example of Mr. Boehner taking sides against workers.

Former Representative David Obey of Wisconsin on Thursday accused Mr. Walker of acting like Hosni Mubarak, the deposed president of Egypt, as protestors marched in the streets of Cairo.

“I think what Gov. Walker is trying to do amounts to political thuggery,” Mr. Obey told Talking Points Memo. “It is one thing to say that these are tough times — everybody’s got to cut back and public employees are going to have to take cuts like the rest of us … but he’s using it as an excuse to gut the ability of workers to organize and bargain collectively. In my view that’s outrageous.”

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee declined to respond to Mr. Boehner’s accusation of spreading disinformation. But officials confirmed that Organizing for America, an arm of the party, has been “quietly, but significantly, involved in
building grassroots energy and organizing protests.”

The political efforts on behalf of the union workers in Wisconsin were undertaken at the direction of Tim Kaine, the D.N.C. chairman, according to officials at the party.

In addition to helping build crowds for two rallies in Madison this week, O.F.A. organized 15 “rapid-response phone banks” aimed at getting supporters to call state lawmakers. The effort covered 10 cities in Wisconsin, officials said.

Volunteer leaders of O.F.A. helped organize the rallies and youth leaders at college campuses brought buses to help transport people. Another O.F.A. program sought to get letters published in 23 targeted newspapers in Wisconsin. O.F.A. also used blogs, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail messages to rally opposition to Mr. Walker’s efforts.

Mr. Boehner, in his comments Thursday, said Mr. Obama should call a stop to those efforts.

“I urge the president to order the D.N.C. to suspend these tactics,” Mr. Boehner said. “This is not the way you begin an ‘adult conversation’ in America about solutions to the fiscal challenges that are destroying jobs in our country.”

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Mike Segar/Reuters Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, speaks to protestors at the “Main Street to Wall Street” rally in New York, April 29, 2010.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, says Washington politicians are living in an “Alice in Wonderland political climate” that ignores the needs of workers struggling to survive in a difficult economy.

The sharp-edged remarks are part of a speech Mr. Trumka is scheduled to give Wednesday morning that is designed to push back against the policies of Republican lawmakers who seized control of the House in last year’s elections. It is also a goad to President Obama, whose administration has recently seemed eager to court the business community.

The speech will help to set the tone of a debate that is likely to intensify as business and labor groups verbally clash during the 2012 presidential campaign.

“So let me get this straight,” Mr. Trumka says, according to excerpts of remarks obtained by The Caucus. “We need to slash retirement and health benefits for the elderly because we are on the brink of fiscal crisis — but we can afford to squander hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich? Only at the Mad Hatter’s tea party does this make sense.”

The AFL-CIO and other unions spent tens of millions of dollars during the 2010 midterm elections to make the case for Democratic candidates. But most of those candidates ended up losing in a political wave that swept in many lawmakers backed by the increasingly influential Tea Party movement.

Mr. Trumka plans to say the elections were “fundamentally about jobs” and predicts the 2012 campaign will feature the same concerns among voters.

“People who live in Wonderland may not have noticed, but there is a lot of work to be done here,” he will say in the speech. “We have let our transnational business titans convince our politicians that our national strength lies in their profits, not our jobs.”

The speech stands in stark contrast to one given last week by Mr. Trumka’s arch-rival, Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce. In that speech, Mr. Donohue said the economic problems that remain are the regulatory and policy impediments to business growth.

“We must make our domestic economy more attractive to global investors, job creators and startup entrepreneurs by clearing away the impediments that are causing them to sit on their capital or invest it outside of the United States,” Mr. Donohue said. “And we must do right for future generations and our economy by beginning a serious effort to cut runaway spending, reform entitlements, and bring government deficits and debt under control.”

The two organizations run by Mr. Trumka and Mr. Donohue are physically located near each other — both facing the White House on the edge of Lafayette Park, separated by only a single city block.

But their constituencies, message and style could not be more different. And while Washington politicians search for ways to tone down their harsh rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shootings, the two men are unlikely to hold much back.

Mr. Trumka was a coal miner. Mr. Donohue spent 13 years representing the interest of trucking companies. Both are aggressive to a fault. And both are at the helm of organizations which are likely to have millions of dollars at their disposal.

The chamber, officially, will not take sides in the presidential election, although Mr. Donohue’s dislike for many of Mr. Obama’s policies is no secret. And Mr. Donohue has made it clear the group will be very active in pursuing Republican control of the Senate in 2012.

“The chamber will vigorously defend the rights of companies and the associations that represent them to lobby, to petition the government and to fully participate in the political and policy debates that will shape the future of our country,” Mr. Donohue said last week. “We will not allow the business community to be intimidated and we will use every tool at our disposal to challenge those who try to silence our voice.”

But Mr. Trumka is just as determined to make sure that the voice of the worker is also heard.

In his speech Wednesday, he accuses politicians in Washington and across the country of “attacking the very idea of the American middle class — the idea that in America economic security — health care, a real pension, a wage that can pay for college — is not something for a privileged few, but rather what all of us can earn in exchange for a hard day’s work.”

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address in front of a congress with newly energized Republican members. The president has already hinted that he will seek compromise and accommodation with the Republican leaders of the House.

In a statement ahead of the House vote to repeal his health care overhaul, Mr. Obama said: “I’m willing and eager to work with both Democrats and Republicans to improve the Affordable Care Act. But we can’t go backward.”

Mr. Trumka plans to say that the country’s labor movement is eager for “a call to action” by the president on behalf of workers.

“We are ready for vision, and we believe in the President’s vision of a nation that is strong because we are just and true to our values,” Trumka will say. “A vision for a national future founded on the profound truth that social justice and material prosperity are not competing values — they are necessary to each other.”

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The AFL-CIO is circulating an election analysis that says union voters could be the difference between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Speaker John Boehner. The group says there are heavy concentrations of union voters in about half of 75 seats held by endangered Democrats and in other battleground districts as well. “I’m not saying there won’t [...]

Following up on its promise to spend big and fight hard for Democrats this election year, the nation’s largest labor federation sent out 2.5 million campaign mailers Monday, going after GOP candidates in nearly 50 congressional and gubernatorial races. The aggressive mail campaign by the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union accuses Republicans of [...]