The rogue NLRB

As the Wall Street Journal--paid registration required--tells us, President Obama's NLRB is a rogue agency.

A federal court last month ruled that three members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unlawfully appointed by President Obama. The board lacks a quorum yet will carry on as if nothing happened; Chairman Mark Pearce announced that he "disagrees" with the court's decision. After making hundreds of decisions that killed jobs and increased economic uncertainty, the board is set to decide a hundred more.

For small business owners, this is par for the course. A survey last month of 600 small businesses with 100 or fewer employees revealed that 70% of their owners feel Washington is hostile to their efforts to create jobs. Conducted by the nonprofit Job Creators Alliance, the survey revealed that this feeling crosses party, gender and race lines. Democratic small business owners and women and minority small business owners are almost as pessimistic as their white male Republican peers.

There are many reasons for their pessimism. Leading the list were political concerns. Six of 10 small business owners believe that ObamaCare will hurt their business in 2013. Half are worried about the lack of spending cuts in the recent fiscal-cliff deal. Such concerns help explain minuscule economic growth and the recent uptick in unemployment. Worried business owners don't invest, expand and create jobs. They hunker down and try to survive.

And why would they hope for change when they see a job-killing machine like the NLRB ignore a unanimous court ruling and continue to attack job creators?

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