Recess appointment to labor board is troubling
President Barack Obama’s recess appointment of union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board makes little sense to us. It’s like appointing a coal energy executive to sit on the Environmental Protection Agency’s appeal board.
We’re disappointed Obama used his executive powers to bypass the confirmation process and appoint Becker while Congress was away on recess.
Presidential appointees deserve an up-or-down vote in the Senate unless there are legitimate questions regarding the fitness of the nominee. Becker clearly qualifies for more questioning.
We question Becker’s ability to be an arbiter enforcing fairness in union elections, and would hope our representatives would have those same concerns. Yet a spokeswoman for Sen. Michael Bennet, after he voted to send Becker’s nomination to the floor, said “this is a qualified candidate for this position. It’s too bad some in Congress are too caught up with playing political games.”
While he deserved a vote, we don’t think it’s a political game to ask whether Becker’s stark anti-business positions should disqualify make him from sitting on the National Labor Relations Board.
Becker served as counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO. It was SEUI president Andy Stern who visited the Obama White House 38 times (at last count), and his union spent a reported $66 million to help the president win election.
Unions won nearly 70 percent of private ballot elections conducted in 2008 by the NLRB — the highest rate since this information was collected in 1984. Yet, Becker believes that the odds are not skewed enough toward unions.
He not only supports so-called “card check,” the Employee Free Choice Act that which would effectively eliminate secret ballots and strip away worker privacy when forming a union, he also advocates for the elimination of the “no union” option from workers’ ballots. And he thinks employers should have no “role in union organizing campaigns and in union representation elections.”
How can Americans expect Becker will exhibit impartiality?
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, for instance, already has asked Becker to recuse himself from 12 cases because “his prior writings demonstrate a bias against the group.”
We understand the Obama administration’s frustration with the lack of bipartisanship in Congress, especially when Republicans decide that obstruction (though the vote against Becker was bipartisan) is their best political bet.
But that doesn’t mean that appointing deeply flawed candidates under the cover of this political storm is acceptable.
Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14803601#ixzz0k03PeNob
