Senator Rand Paul announced on Monday he was joining the legal challenge of President Obama’s “recess without a recess” appointments to the NLRB. Paul is the first member of the Senate to legally object to the appointments and plans to file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of legal action by the National Federation for Independent Business and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The groups are arguing that the NLRB appointments, and Richard Corday’s appointment to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are unconstitutional. “With the recent recess appointments, President Obama has circumvented our Constitution and showed complete disregard for the separation of powers,” Paul said in a statement Tuesday. “He has demonstrated once again that he is willing to treat the office of the presidency like a dictatorship.” Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee will begin hearings this week on the effect the President’s actions may have on businesses regulated by the NLRB and the CFPB. It is expected that uncertainty surrounding the constitutionality of the appointments will chill business growth. As we reported in the January 19 issue of INK, the Sharon Block and Richard Griffin were sworn into their positions on the labor board before either passed even the perfunctory stage of the Senate approval process, which includes review of financial disclosures and potential conflicts of interest. And now we have learned from those documents that Griffin, former general council of the Operating Engineers, will continue to receive pension payments of an undisclosed amount from the union while sitting on the Board. He will also receive a single lump payment equal to three weeks of his almost $400K union salary. Is there no one else out there qualified to sit on the Board who is not pulling a check from a union pension fund? Finally, in a somewhat surreal State of the Union address last week, the President read off the wish list of the billion-dollar gorilla in the room without daring to call it by name. At the end of a year when labor battles dominated even the mainstream media headlines (Boeing, Scott Walker, Occupy, Chris Christie hates your children) and the start of a year when Obama could lose his job without some serious Big Labor love, the President never once used the words “union” (lowercase) or “labor.” The President did refer of course to the “state of the Union” and once to a “unionized” Master Lock plant in (ahem) Wisconsin but beyond that he spoke to his Big Labor benefactors only in top secret code – manufacturer bailouts, infrastructure spending, public school funding, trade protectionism, alternative energy, immigration amnesty, construction jobs, rebuild the middle class, wage disparity, soak the rich, corporate evildoers, blah blah blah. It’s as if the speech pretty much wrote itself after one phone call to Richard Trumka. And yet some people are just never satisfied. United Electrical Workers political director Chris Townsend groused, “There is little or nothing in this speech to oppose what most employers are doing; cutting jobs, busting unions, slashing wages, liquidating benefits, and running roughshod over workers in every way possible. As for workers, we are forced to work for a poverty existence at a ‘competitive wage’ until we tipple into the grave. How inspiring is that?”
