Last month I wrote a piece about how, after a federal court found that President Obama lacked the constitutional authority to make three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), White House spokesman Jay Carney called the decision “novel and unprecedented.” The issue was whether or not the Senate was in recess at the time, and if the President was authorized to make that determination.
A couple of articles have documented what has happened since. In an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Bernie Marcus, the co-founder and former CEO of Home Depot, he says the NLRB “will carry on as if nothing happened.” He said that “After making hundreds of decisions that killed jobs and increased economic uncertainty, the board is set to decide a hundred more.”
While President Obama claims to be focused on jobs, Marcus finds evidence that the policies coming from the administration are in fact hampering job growth. “A survey last month of 600 small businesses with 100 or fewer employees revealed that 70% of their owners feel Washington is hostile to their efforts to create jobs. Conducted by the nonprofit Job Creators Alliance, the survey revealed that this feeling crosses party, gender and race lines.”
He writes, “There are many reasons for their pessimism. Leading the list were political concerns. Six of 10 small business owners believe that ObamaCare will hurt their business in 2013. Half are worried about the lack of spending cuts in the recent fiscal-cliff deal.”
Marcus asks: “And why would they hope for change when they see a job-killing machine like the NLRB ignore a unanimous court ruling and continue to attack job creators?”
In another column today, this one in The Washington Times, Fred Wszolek, a spokesman for the Workforce Fairness Institute, points out that President Obama has said he will be renominating the two NLRB members whose status the court’s decision referred to.
Wszolek said the NLRB, “which is funded with taxpayer dollars, has operated as a vehicle for Big Labor to achieve bureaucratic victories it could not otherwise see enacted in the legislature. In this discussion, facts matter and union bosses have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the current administration and its allies, and it has demanded a return that has manifested itself in an activist, hyperpartisan government agency.”
He says that the NLRB “has enacted an ‘ambush’ election rule that rushes the collective bargaining process so greatly that employees cannot carefully weigh arguments from both sides and make a decision on unionization absent pressure, while limiting the ability of employers to provide information to their own workers.” It may be a debatable proposition, but when it was introduced as legislation in Congress, according to Wszolek, “It was soundly defeated by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in the House and never even came for a vote in the Senate, where Mr. Obama enjoyed a filibusterproof majority.”
Another example of Obama’s imperial presidency? Stay tuned.
