Obama's "Card Check" Nominee Hits Road Block

Michele Bachmann | October 22, 2009 11:45 AM

Thanks to the efforts of Senator John McCain, President Obama's nominee for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Craig Becker, has hit a road block in the confirmation process. Senator McCain currently has a legislative hold on the nomination, so 60 votes are needed before the Senate can proceed to an up-or-down vote on Becker.

This is crucial, because Becker is yet another Obama nominee with views too extreme for mainstream America. Mr. Becker, who is associate general counsel at the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), ACORN’s Siamese-twin-like ally, is a staunch advocate for "card check," which would take away the secret ballot for American workers.

Perhaps worst of all, Becker has written that the NLRB should be able to enact card check even without Congressional action. Unions could get what they want without Members of Congress having to face the music from their constituents.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, Mr. Becker argued for rewriting current union-election rules in favor of labor. And he suggested the NLRB could do so by regulatory fiat, without a vote in Congress."

In essence, he’d strip American workers of the secret ballot and Congress would be entirely unaccountable to the American people for doing so!

If card check passed, intimidation and harassment would run rampant in the workplace when voting to unionize. The right to a secret ballot is as American as it gets, and to take that privilege away for union gains is simply wrong. The decision about whether to unionize is a serious one and the process should be conducted with safeguards in place.