By Rick Manning
He’s back.
Like a bad penny, Richard Trumka’s and Andy Stern’s heart throb, Craig Becker is back, and it is bad news for America. Yes, Barack Obama has threatened to give Craig Becker, the labor union lawyer apologist, not the curmudgeon Ted Danson character, a recess appointment. It could come as early as next week.
You might remember that last month, the Senate failed to come up with enough votes to bring Becker’s nomination for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to the floor in a bi-partisan rejection of his radical views on the nation’s labor laws.
Becker has written that he believes that the elected representatives in Congress aren’t really needed to achieve most of Big Labor’s legislative wish list for forcing America’s workers into their clutches. He opines that the NLRB can do administratively much of what Stern and Trumka can’t get their pet Congressmen to do legislatively. Now, as a big thank you for their obedience on the health care issue, Obama is going to go around the Constitution’s advise and consent mandate, and put Big Labor’s dream date on the very body that decides union-organizing rules through a special appointment process.
It is not a coincidence that Obama may be giving this gift to the big union leaders who have bragged that they spent over $300 million to elect him. The revelation is that the true Obama has emerged beyond his teleprompter niceness to show his actual face – one which has as much disdain for American democratic principles as he has for anyone who deigns to disagree with him.
The saddest part about the possible Becker appointment is that Obama and his cohorts will continue to claim that they want to stimulate the economy to promote job growth, yet they will have put the nation’s labor laws under the watchful eye of someone whose policies will not only discourage job growth, but encourage manufacturers and others to move their operations overseas.
Foreign car manufacturers have chosen to hire American workers in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, in order to make quality cars while operating without the UAW breathing down their necks. Now, the NLRB will be controlled by those who would reinterpret the very labor laws that attracted these manufacturing giants to build in the U.S.
Obama’s bowing to Big Labor as if they were a Middle Eastern potentate hurts workers and America’s economy. Let’s hope that his health care after-glow doesn’t lead him to make this disastrous recess appointment.
Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government.
