Sen. Lindsey Graham threatened labor board prior to Boeing complaint

Sen. Lindsey Graham (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Republican outrage and attempts to intimidate the National Labor Relations Board over its complaint against Boeing started before the complaint was filed against the corporation for moving jobs to South Carolina in retaliation for Washington state workers exercising their legally protected rights. The Hill reports:

Days before the NLRB issued the April 20 complaint against Boeing for allegedly retaliating against union workers, there was at least two phone calls between Graham and Lafe Solomon, the NLRB’s acting general counsel, during which the senator tried to talk the agency out of filing the complaint.

“He said that if a complaint was filed, it will be ‘nasty,’ ‘very, very nasty,’ ” Solomon wrote in notes describing a phone call with Graham on April 11. “He said that if complaint issued, he was going ‘full guns a-blazing.’”

Perhaps most entertainingly, Solomon's notes on an earlier call with Graham include Graham saying that "he was more reasonable than his Senate counterpart (Sen. DeMint)."

Graham issued a statement on his calls, which boils down to "yes, I totally threatened to make trouble for the NLRB if it filed a complaint." And of course he did. Republicans were always going to go after the NLRB "full guns a-blazing" the instant the board did anything to protect workers. If it wasn't Boeing, it would have been the next complaint or ruling down the road.