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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Health-Care Workers Aim to Decertify a Union Suspected of Fraud In Minnesota, they suspect the Service Employees International Union of deducting dues with our their permission. By Akash Chougule & Jason Flohrs see note please

This is welcome news…..and hard working union members should also challenge the unions’ use of dues to promote candidates…..rk

As its membership plummets, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is seeking to unionize home health-care workers, who have never previously organized and do not fit the traditional description of the public employees SEIU typically represents. The union is making its attempt in states across the country, but in Minnesota, where it has been rife with fraud, the personal-care attendants are pushing back, pursuing one of the largest union-decertification efforts in the history of the United States.

In 2013, Governor Mark Dayton (D.) signed a law declaring that home health-care providers — mostly women caring for disabled family members — are government employees, but only for purposes of collective bargaining. Shortly thereafter, the SEIU swooped in, pressuring workers to vote for unionization. Fewer than 6,000 ballots were cast, but because Minnesota law requires unions to receive majority support only from those who vote rather than from the entire bargaining unit, the 3,543 yes votes were enough to unionize all 27,000 personal-care attendants in the state.

To make matters worse, caretakers allege that SEIU did more than harass and “stalk” them — they say the union also forged signatures and denied anti-union voters ballots in the representation election.

Nonetheless, the resulting contract stipulated that 3 percent of the Medicaid funds that caregivers received in compensation for their work would be taken from them and handed over as union dues to the SEIU. But thanks to the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn (2014), unions representing home health workers can collect payment only from those who voluntarily opt in to the union and agree to have the dues deducted. But in Minnesota, the SEIU was caught deducting dues from caregivers who never gave them permission to do so.

Patricia Johansen, a personal-care attendant in Otter Tail County, Minn., told Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom that she never voted for the union or agreed to join and have dues deducted. In the fall of 2015, however, she noticed that the SEIU had been skimming dues from her Medicaid funds. When she complained, the SEIU said it had her signed dues-deduction authorization card on file.

Patricia, who is left-handed and “writes in an elegant and distinctive cursive” script, requested a copy — and received a form that had been filled out in her name in “crude, block letters” with a “clumsy” signature. Patricia had her dues refunded after notifying the union that she had been defrauded, but others have not been as lucky.

Now she and other personal-care attendants are collecting signatures to put the SEIU back on the ballot in hopes of decertifying this union that appears to have engaged in voter disenfranchisement, identity theft, and unlawful dues deduction, all in order to divert Medicaid funds to its own coffers.

Obama Political Spying Scandal: Trump Associates Were Not the First Targets This list includes Dennis Kucinich and investigative journalists. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In 2011, Dennis Kucinich was still a Democratic congressman from Ohio. But he was not walking in lockstep with President Obama — at least not on Libya. True to his anti-war leanings, Kucinich was a staunch opponent of Obama’s unauthorized war against the Qaddafi regime.

Kucinich’s very public efforts included trying to broker negotiations between the administration and the Qaddafi regime, to whom the White House was turning a deaf ear. It was in that context that he took a call in his Washington office from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the ruler’s son and confidant. Four years later, as he recalled in a recent opinion piece, Kucinich learned that the call had been recorded and leaked to the Washington Times.

The former lawmaker believes the monitoring of his communication and the subsequent leak are the work of American intelligence agents.

To be sure, it is not a solid case. Kucinich is now a commentator at Fox News, on whose website he explains his side of the story, and on whose programming ardently pro-Trump contributors are a staple — including contributors who have been sympathetic to the new president’s claim that he was monitored by his predecessor. The gist of Kucinich’s piece is to “vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur.” The express point is to counter the ridicule heaped on Trump’s claim that he personally was wiretapped at Trump Tower.

As we’ve repeatedly noted (see, e.g., here, here, and here), there is no known support for Trump’s narrow claim (made in a series of March 4 tweets). Yet, there is now overwhelming evidence that the Obama administration monitored Trump associates and campaign and transition officials. There were, moreover, leaks of classified information to the media — particularly in the case of Trump’s original national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose telephone communications with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. were unlawfully disclosed to the Washington Post.

There is a question closely related to that of whether the Obama administration was guilty of a gross abuse of power — exploiting its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to keep tabs on its political opponents, thwarting and punishing their resistance. The question is: Did it start with Donald Trump?

Facebook Encourages Employees to Skip Work for Pro-Immigrant May Day Protests By Debra Heine

Facebook Inc. has given its staff the green light to skip work and join pro-immigrant protests on May 1, “International Workers’ Day,” when members of the communist left around the world protest.

The tech giant said it won’t punish employees who take time off to join pro-immigrant protests, and according to Bloomberg News, the company will also “investigate” if any of its vendors (providing security staff, janitors, shuttle-bus drivers, etc.) “illegally crack down on their employees’ protest rights.”

“At Facebook, we’re committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and speaking up,” a spokesman wrote in an emailed statement. “We support our people in recognizing International Workers’ Day and other efforts to raise awareness for safe and equitable employment conditions.”

Facebook notified employees of its policy in a posting on an internal forum April 14. A spokesman said it applies regardless of whether workers notify the company ahead of time. The Menlo Park, California, company also said it would re-evaluate its ties to any vendor if it breaks the law that protects workers’ rights to organize and protect themselves.

“It’s important not just to the engineers and H-1B holders that are traditionally thought of as the immigrants in tech but also to folks who are subcontracted but work side-by-side on those campuses,” said Derecka Mehrens, co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising, a union-backed coalition. “Immigrants play a critical role in the tech sector — both as engineers and coders but also in keeping tech campuses running smoothly.”

I remember well how Facebook — dedicated as they are to “fostering an inclusive workplace where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and speaking up” — gave a similar green light to tea-party conservatives who wanted to protest against Obama’s policies from 2009 to 2012.

Wait … that didn’t happen at all, did it? To be fair, that’s likely because they had very few — if any — conservative employees at the time (at least none that were out of the closet).

On the other hand, Facebook did allow its liberal employees to suppress conservative views in its “Trending News Module” for years on end.

Facebook is only one out of many other tech companies that have been vocal in their opposition to Trump’s immigration agenda. In February, more than 120 tech firms united in opposition to his executive order on immigration by filing a legal brief. CONTINUE AT SITE

Elizabeth Warren’s book says socialism will work like it’s never worked before By Ed Straker

Elizabeth Warren’s new book, “This Fight is Our Fight”, says that ordinary folk can do better economically if we only had more government control and less individual freedom.

As a liberal writer in the New York Times says:

She rails against the growing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite;

Is Warren referring to the US government? Perhaps the “tiny elite” she refers to are the legislative, judicial, and executive branch which have more and more of our hard earned money, and more control over us than any corporation ever could.

She argues that this concentration of economic rewards has also undermined our political system;

Warren’s right about that, in a way; when one group of citizens can vote themselves the money of another group of citizens, our political system is undermined.

and links unequal wealth and power to the stagnating incomes, growing insecurity and diminishing opportunities facing ordinary families.

Warren’s right about that too, in an unintended way. The more government spends, the less is available to the private sector. Out of control government spending and over $200 trillion in unfunded government obligations will eventually crush the economy.

She puts a face on these stresses with capsule portraits of middle-class travails: a Walmart worker who needs to visit a food pantry, a DHL worker forced to take a huge pay cut, a millennial crushed by student debt.

Getting Over Hillary Democrats need to comprehend the Electoral College. James Freeman

Among the more remarkable aspects of Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016 is that a political rookie seemed to have a better grasp of the rules of the election than his highly experienced opponent. Specifically, Mr. Trump’s message to voters was premised on the idea that the Electoral College would decide the winner. More than any candidate in recent memory, he offered an explicit pitch to the Midwestern voters he needed to secure an electoral win, while making almost no effort to build a constituency in states he was likely to lose. The losing side in 2016 is still struggling to come to grips with this fact, as it explores various reasons to explain away its failure.

“Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton ?” is the headline on a recent Andrew Sullivan column for New York magazine that blames Mrs. Clinton for her 2016 loss. Mr. Sullivan writes that he’s amazed by the hold that the Clinton family “still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general.”

It might seem obvious to blame a loss on the loser, but Mr. Sullivan observes:

…everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were.

This column has heard other explanations for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, including fake news and the WikiLeaks publication of Clinton adviser John Podesta’s private emails. But Mr. Sullivan is urging Democrats to stop making excuses:

Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment… the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union… She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one… And yet she still managed to lose!

Highway From the Endangerment Zone Scott Pruitt is right to avoid a fight over an anti-CO2 EPA finding.

Scott Pruitt has emerged as a leading voice in the Trump Administration for U.S. withdrawal from the Paris global climate deal, so it’s ironic that the Environmental Protection Agency chief is being assailed from the right for being soft on carbon. Too many conservatives these days are searching for betrayals where none exist.

As Attorney General of Oklahoma, Mr. Pruitt successfully sued to stop the enforcement of President Obama’s regulations known as the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, and he’s preparing to dismantle them for good as EPA administrator. The rap from the right is that he won’t challenge the underlying determination for regulating CO 2 emissions known as an endangerment finding. In 2009 the EPA concluded in this finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and the environment, and this document serves as the nominal legal basis for the CPP and other anticarbon rules.

Mr. Pruitt’s critics claim that withdrawing from the CPP without reversing endangerment will strengthen his opponents in the inevitable green lawsuits that are coming. Endangerment findings create a legal obligation for the EPA to regulate the relevant pollutants, even if carbon is far different from traditional hazards like SO X and NO X .

The endangerment finding was deeply misguided and flawed in its execution, and nobody fought it more than we did. But there’s a practical reason that Mr. Pruitt is right about the risks of trying to revoke it now. The finding has been upheld by the courts, and creating a legally bulletproof non-endangerment rule would consume a tremendous amount of EPA resources, especially at an agency with few political appointees and a career staff hostile to reform.

Technical determinations about the state of the science are supposed to be entitled to judicial deference, but the reality is that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that would hear the case is packed with progressive judges. Climate change has become a theological conviction on the left, so Mr. Pruitt would almost certainly lose either with a three-judge panel or en banc.

The Supreme Court’s appetite for such a case is also minimal, since it would run directly at the 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that prepared the way for the endangerment finding. Justice Anthony Kennedy was in that 5-4 majority.

Offshore Drilling Blowout Preventer A new rule would damage Trump’s plans for more U.S. energy.

President Trump is filling out his Administration, but too slowly, and an offshore drilling proposal shows why having personnel to mind the store is so important. Barring a late reversal, Mr. Trump may abet his predecessor’s goal of undermining American energy production.

Two days before President Obama left office—the encyclopedia definition of a midnight regulation—U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) rolled out a new rule on the Jones Act. Under this 1920 law, all ships transporting goods between U.S. ports must be U.S.-flagged, constructed in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens and crewed by U.S. citizens.

Most ships in the offshore oil and gas industry like crewboats or platform-supply vessels already comply with the Jones Act in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and elsewhere. But Customs now wants to extend the mandate to certain specialized drilling, construction and engineering vessels. Currently, about 30 CPB regulatory precedents stretching back 40 years exempt these ships from the Jones Act.

The reason is that the drilling industry is global and mobile. Heavy-lift construction vessels, for example, are used to install moorings in deep water and perform other specific, limited tasks. There are 76 in the world—and none of them comply with the Jones Act. The international fleet of crane barges tops out at 173, only 17 of which qualify.

If the CPB reverses historic precedent, the damage will be immediate and disorderly. Current development will be delayed or the rule could even become a de facto moratorium. Removing foreign-flagged vessels from the U.S. supply chain will make future projects riskier and more expensive. Proponents claim U.S. fleets can simply buy new equipment, but that takes time and in any case is a misallocation of resources to satisfy an arbitrary regulation.

The motives of Mr. Obama and career CPB staff are obvious: to reduce oil-and-gas investment. Less obvious is the support of some Republicans in Congress, especially the Louisiana delegation led by Majority Whip Steve Scalise. They’re cheering because they think blocking foreign competition will benefit the local maritime trade.

The Battle of Berkeley The leftist mob has sown the wind. Now, the whirlwind looms. By David French

If the media accurately and comprehensively reported on leftist mob violence, it would see that a pattern has emerged: On campus and in the streets, a violent or menacing core seizes the ground it wants, blocks access to buildings, and shuts down the speech or events it seeks to suppress. This violent core is often surrounded and protected by a larger group of ostensibly “peaceful” protesters who sometimes cheer aggression wildly and then provide cover for the rioters, who melt back into the crowd. After the riot, the polite progressives condemn the violence, urge that it not distract from the alleged rightness of the underlying cause, and then do virtually nothing to enforce the law and punish the offenders.

We’ve seen this play out time and again as mobs shut down campus speech, occupy campus buildings, and even assault innocent people — all without facing any real fear of arrest or meaningful punishment. In the aftermath of the Middlebury College incident, where protesters blocked Charles Murray from speaking, surrounded his car as he tried to leave, and sent a professor to the hospital, academics from across the political spectrum said all the right things. But the authorities have so far done nothing. Conservative Princeton professor Robert George has taken to tweeting a daily reminder that the mob is still winning:

45 DAYS, still no one has been expelled or prosecuted for the mob violence and attack on academic freedom at Middlebury. #remembermiddlebury https://t.co/aeqmO2MSuH
— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) April 17, 2017

At Berkeley, a mob blocked Milo Yiannopolous from speaking, before going on a violent rampage that included arson, smashed windows, and assault on innocent bystanders. Americans were pepper-sprayed and beaten for the “crime” of supporting Donald Trump while the police stood idly by, letting the riot play out before arresting a grand total of one person.

Urban and academic progressive leaders can respond to violence with all the scolding tweets, sternly worded statements, and calls for calm they want. But until those who break the law and violate university policies are aggressively brought to justice, it won’t matter. As long as those who preside over our most prominent academic institutions continue to heed leftist threats and attacks rather than stand up for peaceful conservative speech, the rule of law will remain abandoned in favor of the mob’s agenda. And history proves that once a government abandons the rule of law, it has a hard time controlling the consequences.

Case in point: this weekend’s battle in Berkeley.

Campus and urban progressives have a choice to make. Is this a nation of laws?

Complexity Is the Root of All Evil (at Least in the Tax Code) As Congress takes up reform, it should consider radically simplifying the rules for individuals. By Nina E. Olson

As the national taxpayer advocate, I oversee an independent unit within the Internal Revenue Service that has helped more than four million individual and business taxpayers resolve their IRS account problems, and I am required to report to Congress annually on the most serious problems encountered by U.S. taxpayers.

If I had to distill everything I’ve learned into one sentence, it would be this: The root of all evil is the complexity of the tax code.

There is currently considerable support in Congress to take up corporate tax reform, and corporate reform is certainly needed. But I urge policy makers to remember that, as compared with about two million taxable corporations, there are 151 million individual taxpayers, including 27 million who report sole-proprietor or farm business income with their individual returns. There are also nearly nine million pass-through entities (S corporations and partnerships), the income from which is reported on individual income-tax returns. These taxpayers desperately need relief from the extraordinary compliance burdens the tax code imposes.

I have long believed comprehensive tax simplification is achievable by following the model of the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986. Skeptics point out that asking taxpayers to give up tax breaks from which they currently benefit will generate pushback, and that’s certainly true. But if policy makers pair substantial reductions in tax expenditures with substantial reductions in tax rates, and maintain current tax-burden levels by income decile, I believe taxpayers will appreciate that their tax burdens on average won’t change much—and they will actually end up better off because they will save money on compliance costs. That approach prevailed 30 years ago, and despite some significant differences in circumstances, it could prevail again today.

I recommend that policy makers consider the following core principles in developing tax-reform legislation:

First, the tax system should not be so complex as to create traps for the unwary.

Trump’s Deregulation Project Thirteen Obama rules are gone so far, but there’s much more to do.

Health reform may be on life support and tax reform uncertain, but one part of the Donald Trump economic growth project is succeeding: deregulation. The question is whether the President will now rev up the effort.

President Trump last week signed the 13th bill repealing regulations through a potent tool called the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows Congress to reject rules in a majority vote within 60 legislative days of publication. The 1996 law had previously been used only once, when Congress and George W. Bush nixed an ergonomics directive from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Two other repeal resolutions have passed the House and are pending in the Senate.

The list of rejects includes the Interior Department’s Stream Protection Rule, which would have eliminated a third of coal-industry jobs and usurped state authority over mining, for little environmental improvement. Awaiting Senate repeal is the Bureau of Land Management’s venting and flaring rule for natural-gas fracking. That aimed to reduce methane emissions, though they have already dropped more than 15% since 1990 even as U.S. energy exploration has doubled in a decade.

Other worthy targets: A Federal Communications Commission regulation that would have forced Comcast to abide by consumer privacy standards that Amazon and Google could ignore. Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) moved a bill to deep-six a teacher training mandate that features incentives for teachers to avoid struggling schools that need talented instruction most. The left is spreading panic about potential sludge rivers or killer toys, but these reversals merely restore the status quo of six months ago.

Congressional Review actions do not include Mr. Trump’s executive orders, which have directed agencies to reconsider the trillion-dollar Clean Power Plan, the Labor Department’s financial advice diktat known as the fiduciary rule, among many others.

Then there are the rules that agencies have delayed and may eventually scrap, from micromanaging ceiling fan efficiency to organic farming standards. Sam Batkins at the American Action Forum estimates that 15 delayed rules alone would require 10 million hours of paperwork. That time could be devoted to activities that produce wealth and innovation, and the main losers would be compliance lawyers.

The White House and Senate Republicans have said the 60-day review period for Congressional Review Act measures will end next month. But our colleague Kimberley Strassel has explained how the law applies to past rules that agencies failed to report to Congress as required. The same is true for “guidance” letters, such as the Education Department’s sexual assault “Dear Colleague,” that were imposed with the force of law without having to go through a public comment period.