Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, February 09, 2010 6:35:12 PM
February 8, 2010 4:00 A.M.
The ‘Shut Up’ Candidate
Obama’s labor pick wants to silence critics and rig the rules in union elections.
Barack Obama and his closest allies have a message for America, and that message is: “Shut up.”
Obama himself is famous for telling his critics to shut up: “I don’t
want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” he said
while defending his so-far ineffective economic-recovery agenda. “I
want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t
mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.” The
president used the State of the Union address to hector, in a most
unstatesmanlike fashion, the justices of the Supreme Court
for upholding the First Amendment right of nonprofits and businesses to
make their voices heard before elections, and demanded that Congress
pass legislation to shut them up. Endlessly described as “articulate,”
the president apparently desires to monopolize the conversation. But
Craig Becker, his nominee to the powerful National Labor Relations
Board, surpasses the president in that he has made an entire legal and
political philosophy out of “shut your trap.”
The NLRB is one
of our most defective public institutions. Charged with policing unfair
labor practices in general, and with overseeing union-organizing votes
in particular, the NLRB is far from a neutral referee — it acts
principally as an organ of the unions themselves, and it bristles with
hostility toward business owners
who are not eager to have their operations organized by the likes of
the Teamsters or the ACORN-affiliated Service Employees International
Union.
Becker, a lawyer for the AFL-CIO and SEIU, in many
ways fits the mold of a typical Democratic pick for the agency, but
there are three reasons to have serious reservations about putting him
in such a powerful position. First: His opinions are extreme. He has
argued that workers should be allowed to choose only between unions,
not between a union and no representation,
and he wants employers to be banned from even attending NLRB hearings
about union elections. On the subject of the NLRB itself, he has gone
so far as to write that “employers
should have no right to be heard in either a representation case or an
unfair labor practice case, even though Board rulings might indirectly
affect their duty to bargain.” In other words: “Shut up.”
Second: He is affiliated with ACORN, a corrupt enterprise that works
the intersection of Big Labor and politics for its own benefit. Third:
He has lied to Congress about his relationship with ACORN. On all of
those grounds, his nomination should be opposed, vigorously.
http://article.nationalreview.com/424227/the-shut-up-candidate/kevin-williamson