Obama’s illegal NLRB appointments are even more outrageous than his appointment of Cordray

The IUOE is an especially autocratic union that has been criticized by union activists for imposing strict Internet censorship on union members who have the temerity to run against current union leadership. Griffin justified the gag rule as necessary to protect the “union’s sensitive and/or confidential internal workings.” Griffin even tried to impose fines on his own union workers for challenging the gag rule in court.

In 1998 testimony to a House committee, Griffin argued for more expansive NLRB powers to order fines and other remedies, for allowing the board to enforce its decisions without a court order and for allowing unions to organize at single locations. Most significantly, in that testimony Griffin was asked directly whether unions and employers both engage in illegal conduct. He said: “The vast majority of illegal conduct is committed by employers, and therefore the vast majority of charges are addressed to employer conduct.”

Griffin is clearly Becker’s ideological fellow-traveler and can be expected to continue the NLRB’s bureaucratic rewrite of our labor laws to tilt the playing field to union bosses and allow them to rig the rules to force workers into unions and into paying union dues.

The Senate will have a key opportunity to stand up to the NLRB in the near future, when it considers a vote on a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the recently finalized ambush election rule. This vote will be protected from filibuster under the CRA and will therefore need just 51 votes to pass. If it passes the House and Senate, the president could veto it, but at that point he would have to take full political responsibility for the rule and the rest of the NLRB’s extreme agenda. Most importantly, the vote will tell us where every senator stands on the actions of this dubiously constituted board and its radical agenda.

Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity and author of Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him.