High school civics students and aficionados of “Schoolhouse Rock!” can be forgiven if they are bewildered by what took place in the U.S. Senate last week. It was Barack “We Can’t Wait” Obama’s new process of turning a bill into a law — not by duly passing it in both houses of Congress, but by issuing bureaucratic dictates and counting on Senate Democrats to block any effort to stop them.
The particulars this time were especially egregious. The Senate, before the 2010 landslide when it still had a 60-vote Democratic majority, rejected the ridiculously named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — both its first version that eliminated private ballot union elections entirely, and its revised version that retained private ballots but allowed union organizers to catch businesses off-guard with surprise “ambush elections.”
Obama, intent on rewriting the labor laws with or without Congress, nominated a radical union lawyer, Craig Becker, to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Becker had written extensively on how the NLRB could rewrite the labor laws to favor union bosses, making it entirely foreseeable that he would use a seat on the NLRB to sidestep Congress and push forward with the provisions of the failed EFCA bill. The Senate therefore rejected his nomination on a bipartisan vote.
Sidestepping Congress, Obama recess-appointed Becker and he led a string of extreme anti-business actions last year that went well beyond the NLRB’s legitimate authority. One such action, a rule requiring businesses to put up posters touting the benefits of unionization, was struck down in court. Another, set to take effect next week, will implement the “ambush elections” feature of EFCA even though that legislation is not the law.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/01/how-a-bureaucratic-dictate-becomes-a-law/#ixzz1tjke0fGX
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