Emily
MikeLast Tuesday, President Obama told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that he would make recess appointments if Republicans didn’t allow his nominations to go through. Because of that, the Senate cleared 27 nominees on Thursday. You would think that the success of his threat would encourage Obama to take other actions that wouldn’t go over well with Republicans.
However, Obama appears again to have withdrawn into his unworkable (and pathetic) belief that his over-riding responsibility is to never antagonize Republicans. And, therefore, Obama said on Thursday that he will not use his recess-appointment power for the other stalled nominees when the Senate goes on recess next week.
If the reason Obama said he would not make recess appointments is because he made that part of the deal with McConnell, then he never should have made the deal. He should have just made the recess appointments. After all, recess appointments are a well-established power of U.S. presidents. George W. Bush made about 200 recess appointments during his terms and Bill Clinton made about 150. On the other hand, if Obama did not promise McConnell that he would make no recess appointments for the other stalled nominees, there is nothing to stop Obama from making recess appointments.
In particular, during the recess, Obama should appoint Craig Becker to one of the three open positions in the National Labor Relations Board. Republicans have long held up Becker because he is a former union lawyer. Last week, the Republicans (strangely) allowed Becker’s nomination to come to a full vote. He received 52 votes, which was less than that needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. So, here we have a person who had a majority of the votes. Go ahead and appoint him, Mr. President. The NLRB has been dysfunctional for a long time because only two of the five positions have been filled and the two are one Democrat and one Republican. Essentially, nothing ever gets done. The result is that union disputes almost never get acted upon and business is the winner. In an article in the Washington Post, the author wrote this:
Even lawyers who represent employers say the [National Labor Relations Board] system is badly outdated. There has not been a major change to labor laws since the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. With no progress on the legislative side, energies have focused on the five-member National Labor Relations Board, the panel of presidential appointees that rules on election disputes and labor complaints appealed by unions and employers. The NLRB is such a political football that it borders on the dysfunctional. For the past 26 months, only two of its five seats have been filled. This can mean long delays for cases awaiting judgment. While the Labor Department has far fewer union elections to oversee these days — 1,343 last year, down from 7,773 in 1970 — it must process about 25,000 unfair-labor-practice charges per year, including many that arise from nasty jurisdictional disputes between unions.
The two board members, a Democrat and a Republican, have managed to make rulings on 500 or so less-controversial cases, but the weightier disputes have been set aside. Sixty cases have been pending for two years or more, and of them, 24 go back more than four years. And the Supreme Court is considering whether the two-person board is even allowed to have made the rulings that it did.
But, later last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs gave a glimmer of hope, saying that Obama is not ruling out using a recess appointment for Becker. For his part, McConnell said (apparently with a straight face) that appointing Becker would undermine Obama’s efforts to reach out to Republicans. Yeah, sure. There’s never going to be any cooperation between the Democrats and Republicans.
It would be great if Obama appoints Becker during the recess. It could show that he is finally overcoming his aversion to antagonizing Republicans. But don’t hold your breath.
Filed under: Politics, Workplace Tagged: | Craig Becker, National Labor Relations Board, NLRB
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