Marathon Pundit: Washington Examiner: No more recess appointments to the NLRB

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Washington Examiner: No more recess appointments to the NLRB

Almost two years ago, radical labor lawyer Craig Becker faced almost certain defeat when the US Senate voted to confirm his appointment to the National Labor Relations Board. So President "A New Kind of Politics" Obama utilized a recess appointment so Becker could radicalize the panel.

Becker must leave his seat now. And the Washington Examiner is calling for no more recess appointments to the NLRB.

On December 14, Obama sent the Senate the nominations of Sharon Block and Richard Griffin to replace Becker and Wilma Liebman, whose five-year term on the NLRB expired in August. Block is currently a deputy assistant secretary of labor and is a former senior aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy and former general counsel to a past NLRB chairman. Griffin is the general counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers, and has been a board member of the AFL-CIO's Lawyers Coordinating Committee since 1994. Block and Griffin are viewed as extremely pro-labor, as was Becker.

The Senate Republicans worry that Obama will drop their formal nominations and instead give Block and Griffin recess appointments. In a letter to Obama, the GOP senators wrote that "appointments to the NLRB have traditionally been made through prior agreement of both parties to ensure that any group of nominees placed on the board represents an appropriate political and philosophical balance. Indeed, the very statutory design of the board is meant to ensure a basic level of bipartisanship in the appointment of members." They warned that whenever presidents have departed from that process, trouble has soon followed: "Your controversial recess appointment of NLRB Member Craig Becker is an example of an NLRB nominee having been appointed over the objection of the Senate and the result of that decision has been unending controversy throughout Member Becker's entire term on the board, which has undermined the credibility of the entire NLRB."

There is a solid practical reason to fear that Obama could indeed use recess appointments in defiance of Senate Republicans. With Becker and Liebman leaving the NLRB, it will be without sufficient members to gather a quorum required to conduct official business. The president can logically claim recess appointments are needed so that the panel's official business can continue. The reality, however, is that the "official business" Obama expects his NLRB appointees to continue will be more rulings that egregiously favor Big Labor. The template is the outrageous complaint the board filed against Boeing earlier this year charging it with unfair labor practices simply for building a new non-union plant in South Carolina instead of constructing one near its unionized facility in Washington state. The unjustified complaint was dropped, but only after Boeing spent millions of dollars fighting it. In the interest of preserving some semblance of workplace peace, Obama should refrain from giving Block and Griffin recess appointments, and instead let the Senate conduct a normal confirmation process.