Obama’s Lawless Labor Board
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-lawless-labor-board-1439336842
A court says Lafe Solomon should not have had the job.
One of President Obama’s legacies will be his abuse of executive authority, and his hits keep coming. On Friday a federal appeals court struck down a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board because, incredibly, its acting general counsel was in the job illegally.
The scofflaw was Lafe Solomon, whom readers may recall for his legal complaints against the likes of Boeing for wanting to build planes in right-to-work South Carolina instead of union-dominated Washington. It turns out Mr. Solomon was the one violating the law.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a 2014 NLRB ruling against an Arizona ambulance company, SW General. The panel found that Messrs. Solomon and Obama had violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which generally holds that a person cannot serve as an “acting” officer of an agency while also nominated for the post.
Mr. Obama directed Mr. Solomon to serve as NLRB acting general counsel in June 2010. Six months later he nominated Mr. Solomon for the post. The Senate refused to confirm him and he left the NLRB in November 2013. Yet before he departed Mr. Solomon issued the complaint against SW General and many other companies.
Congress passed the vacancies reform law to prevent precisely this kind of presidential gambit. In 1997 Republicans blocked the nomination of Bill Lann Lee for assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. President Bill Clinton then named Mr. Lee in an “acting” capacity—a move designed to let him serve the remainder of the Administration without Senate approval. Congress then tightened the rules, which Messrs. Obama and Solomon violated so flagrantly that the Administration barely offered a defense in court.
Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote the opinion and was joined by two Obama appointees. The ruling only applies to the SW General case, but it is an open invitation to Mr. Solomon’s other corporate targets to seek relief as well.
This is the third legal strike against Mr. Obama’s NLRB. The D.C. Circuit ruled against his recess appointees in 2013 and the Supreme Court did the same in 2014. The evidence builds that this is the most lawless Administration since Richard Nixon’s.
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