The fear lurking behind the latest Republican attack on the National Labor Relations Board.
Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander apparently want us to know how certain they are that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. They've introduced a bill that would
add a sixth member to the National Labor Relations Board:
Under the current arrangement, three of the board members are chosen by Democrats and two by Republicans.
McConnell’s and Alexander’s bill, called the NLRB Reform Act, would add a sixth board member and require the board to consist of three Republicans and three Democrats, like the Federal Election Commission.
See, the president's party gets three members and the other party gets two. McConnell and Alexander had no problem with the NLRB under George W. Bush, when it was restricting workers' organizing rights at every turn. It's only under President Obama that Republicans have discovered this grave structural flaw in the board's composition. Now, to be sure, they're partly waging a public relations war against the NLRB and partly trying to intimidate its members away from doing anything that would take away too much of the employer advantage in labor law ... but if they thought that two years down the road President Perry or President Christie was going to be appointing NLRB members, do you really think they'd be moving to add a third Democrat to that future board? Not a chance.