By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
The impish lexicographer Ambrose Bierce defined a lawyer as someone "skilled in the circumvention of the law." By that reckoning, the lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are among the most experienced lawyers in town.
While the Senate's Democratic rulers will ignore a Republican bill passed by the House last week aimed at conditionally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board, the upper chamber's GOP minority is determined to keep the panel in limbo until a dispute over President Obama's "recess appointments" is resolved.
President Obama made waves Tuesday by nominating three candidates to the National Labor Relations Board, even as the board's authority is being questioned by the courts and Republicans plot to shut it down.
The National Labor Relations Board indicated that it will press ahead with its work, despite a bombshell ruling Friday that called into question the legitimacy of the agency’s board and of the cases decided by President Obama’s recess appointees over the past year.
The National Labor Relations Board said it is studying its options on how to "move forward" after a court struck down the agency's controversial rule to speed up union-representation elections earlier this week, because of what unions are calling a technicality.
The House on Wednesday approved a bill designed to rein in the National Labor Relations Board in what GOP critics of the board said was an effort to stop the "rogue" agency from rewriting federal labor law to increase the ability of unions to organize a work site.
House Republicans are waging a pre-emptive strike against the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday to keep the group from speeding up the process for organizing unions and to prevent multiple unions at a single company.
"We keep our eye on the prize," the chairman recently said, and he promoted a rule requiring employers to turn over private employee information including home addresses, emails and phone numbers to union organizers.
"The Board respectfully disagrees with today's decision and believes that the president's position in the matter will ultimately be upheld," NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce said late Friday in a statement. "In the meantime, the board has important work to do. The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases, and for that reason, we will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions."
