President Obama, we are told, is exceptionally intelligent. Harvard Law School (salutatorian of his class), president of Harvard Law Review, and about a dozen years teaching Constitutional law. If there’s one subject he should be intimately familiar with, it’s the United States Constitution.
Which is why he, of any other president we have ever had, has no excuse for trying to pull crap like this.
A quick recap: the crux of this whole mess is a scheme called “card check.” That is a way a union can get recognized among employees. If the union can collect signed pledge cards from a majority of the employees, they can skip the currently-mandatory secret ballot election that is the decisive step.
Of course, the union is forbidden from intimidating or unduly influencing the workers while collecting those pledge cards. Completely and absolutely forbidden. It would never happen. Besides, we’re talking unions here. “Union thuggery” is an oxymoron.
Well, “card check” was a big topic over the past few years. The Democrats tried several times to push it into law, but never had the votes to pull it off. The unions did all they could, but “card check” remained a fantasy and not the law of the land.
The mere threat of such a measure prompted several states to take action. They started passing laws that guaranteed the right of workers to have a secret ballot when it came to unionizing.
And that’s when the National Labor Relations Board stepped in. They are threatening to sue those states for passing those laws. Not because the laws conflict with federal laws, but because they conflict with a proposed federal law. Apparently once the federal government considers a law, then the matter instantly becomes a matter of federal concern and the supremacy clause kicks in.
That whole 10th Amendment thing? Forget about it. Once the government says that it is thinking of asserting a power, then that power exists. Even if the bill asserting that control fails, the fact that it was introduced at all instantly guarantees its validity.
Someone notify the Supreme Court. They’ve been operating for centuries assuming that they are the final arbiter of whether or not something is Constitutional. Now we know that all it takes is for Congress to propose a bill, and the matter is automatically within their bailiwick.
Hmm… that could work out rather well in some cases. The repeal of ObamaCare has passed the House, and that’s better than “Card Check” ever did. So can we just deem that to have the force of law, too?
All snark aside, the real reason for this push is because Obama’s best allies are the unions. They want Card Check, because unions are dying in the private sector. Currently, the majority of union members work in the public sector (and that’s a rant for another time), and that number is constantly growing. They need Card Check to boost their private-sector membership.
So they pushed for it to become law. They pushed hard. And they failed.
But, apparently, that doesn’t matter. As far as the NLRB (staffed with a majority of Obama appointees) is concerned, it’s still binding.
I guess that’s what I get for not being a professional Constitutional scholar, and just some schmuck who just reads it and thinks that Congress makes laws, the president enforces laws, and the Supreme Court interprets and judges laws. I missed that whole part where Congress considers and rejects a law, and the president has his flunkies start enforcing it anyway.
