July 5, 2016

The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Richard F. Griffin Jr., recently launched another salvo in the board’s continuing assault on the rights of employers and employees. He aims to alter labor law by punishing employers who—following the publicly expressed wishes of their employees—withdraw recognition from unions.

Currently, employers can refuse to recognize or bargain with incumbent unions if most of their employees wish to free themselves from the union’s grasp. For example, if a majority of employees send signed petitions to an employer’s human-resources department, or voluntarily tell management that they want the union gone, the company can, and should, decline to bargain or acknowledge the legitimacy of the union.

Under the proposed new National Labor Relations Board policy, employers will be precluded from walking away from a union, and will be sanctioned by the NLRB, unless employees first vote to leave in an NLRB-conducted secret-ballot election.

Such elections tend to be costly and protracted affairs, which may be part of their appeal to the NLRB now. Unions have also long disfavored secret-ballot elections. Secret balloting reduces the chance of employees being intimidated. Such elections also subject union-organizing activities to government oversight. Read more »

Trump’s nomination isn’t inevitable—delegates won’t be legally ‘bound’ going into the convention.

by Erik O’Keefe and David B. Rivkin Jr., Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2016

Recent weeks have not been kind to the Grand Old Party. Republicans have been embarrassed by Donald Trump ’s racist attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. They have watched him assault popular GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. Many among the party faithful are realizing that Mr. Trump may flame out before Election Day—and that he could bring the party’s slate of candidates down with him.

Yet conventional wisdom remains that Mr. Trump’s nomination is inevitable. The theory is twofold: First, his primary victories give him enough delegates to prevail on the first ballot at the Republican convention in July. Second, those delegates are bound to vote for Mr. Trump by state laws and GOP rules.

Not so fast. Although 20 states have passed laws that purport to bind delegates, these statutes can’t be legally enforced. When Republican delegates arrive in Cleveland to select their party’s nominee, they should recognize that they are bound only by their consciences.

It’s true that Rule 16 of the Republican National Committee says primaries will be used to “allocate and bind” delegates. But that rule expires at the convention’s start. Though a majority of delegates could vote to adopt a binding rule at the convention, that’s unlikely. It has happened only once before, in 1976, when loyalists of President Ford sought to block the insurgency of Ronald Reagan. This year the Rules Committee will be packed with supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, who has not endorsed Mr. Trump.

State laws that purport to bind delegates can’t be enforced without violating the First Amendment. A political party is a private association whose members join together to further their shared beliefs through electoral politics, and they have a right to choose their representatives. The government has no business telling parties how to select their candidates or leaders: That would be a serious infringement of the rights to free association and speech. Read more »

By Paula J. Dobriansky and David B. Rivkin Jr. in the Washington Post

January 4, 2016, at 7:13 PM

Although international relations are not conducted under Marquess of Queensberry rules and political satire can be expected from one’s foes, intensely personal attacks on foreign leaders are uncommon except in wartime. While Soviet-era anti-American propaganda could be sharp, it did not employ slurs. But in recent years racist and scatological salvos against foreign leaders have become a staple of official Russian discourse.

Turkish, German and Ukrainian officials are cast as sycophantic stooges of the United States. While slamming Ankara at a December news conference for shooting down a Russian plane that violated Turkish airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin opined that “the Turks decided to lick the Americans in a certain place.” Sergey Glaziev, a senior adviser to Putin, has called Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “a Nazi Frankenstein,” and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin compared Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to “a rubber doll from a sex shop.”

The ugliest vilification campaign, however, has been reserved for President Obama. Anti-Obama tweets come openly from government officials. Rogozin, while commenting on Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, compared Obama to a Tuzik, Russian slang for a pathetic small dog. Irina Rodnina , a well-known Duma member, tweeted doctored images of Barack and Michelle Obama staring longingly at a banana.

Nobody in Russia gets to freelance propaganda-wise. Thus, anti-Obama rants, even when coming from prominent individuals outside government, have Putin’s imprimatur. Russian media personalities, including Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the widely viewed “News of the Week” TV roundup, often deliver racist slurs, as compiled by Mikhail Klikushin on the Observer Web magazine. Evgeniy Satanovskiy, a Russian academic and frequent guest on Kiselyov’s program, recently also referred to Obama as a “monkey,” prompting derisive laughter and applause from the audience. Meanwhile, the famous nationalist comedian Mikhail Zadornov regularly deploys the term “schmoe” — a slang Russian prison acronym for a person who is so debased he deserves to be defecated upon — alongside Obama’s name. “Obama schmoe” has become ubiquitous enough to be scrawled on the runway of Russia’s Latakia air base in Syria. Read more »

Paris is Copenhagen all over again — more presidential climate change grandstanding without concrete results.

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. & ANDREW M. GROSSMAN, 10 December 2015 in USA Today

The world is watching as diplomats in Paris hammer out the final details of a new climate agreement involving over 150 countries. The goal, said President Barack Obama, is “an agreement where … each nation has the confidence that other nations are meeting their commitments.”

But the world’s attention may be misplaced. There is no reason to believe that this agreement will conclude any differently from the last three, with nations reneging on commitments to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and to provide billions of dollars in foreign aid to finance reductions in the developing world.

That’s a big problem for the president: reciprocity has always been Congress’s chief concern when it comes to climate-related measures that threaten to drive up energy prices and sap the United States’ international competitiveness. The lack of binding commitments for developing nations like China and India is a big part of what killed consideration of one previous agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, in the Senate. And that, as well as general opposition to new greenhouse emissions regulations by congressional Republicans, presages the same result in Congress this time around.

Despite the messaging coming from the White House, as a legal matter, the president actually does need Congress’s support to complete any kind of meaningful deal. That legal reality is having serious consequences in Paris, where U.S. participation in the final deal is an overriding imperative. For one, it rules out any firm financial commitments. The Constitution, after all, assigns the power of the purse to Congress, and so the president cannot, on his own, set the U.S. foreign aid budget for years into the future. Read more »

In King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court surprised many Court watchers, ruling six to three that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits individuals who buy health insurance on the federal exchange to receive taxpayer subsidies. The decision represents a decisive victory for ACA supporters, and an equally decisive loss for the rule of law. With King, the Supreme Court has signaled (again) that it is willing to “save” important laws by rewriting them, thus behaving as an all-powerful, unelected, politically insulated, unconstitutional Council of Revision.

King is the second time the Court has rescued the ACA. The first time, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), involved a frontal assault on the constitutionality of the Act’s individual mandate and its mandatory Medicaid expansion. The five-Justice NFIB majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, saved the individual mandate by rewriting the word “penalty” to mean “tax,” and disregarding extensive legislative history indicating that Congress had intended to use its commerce power, not its taxing power.

The NFIB majority also ruled that the ACA’s mandatory Medicaid expansion violated federalism by unconstitutionally coercing states. Because the Medicaid expansion was integral to making the ACA “work,” this constitutional infirmity should have rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional pursuant to a severability analysis. But as with the individual mandate, the NFIB majority opted instead to save the ACA, transforming the Medicaid expansion from mandatory to “optional.” In the words of the four NFIB dissenters, the majority “save[d] a statute Congress did not write.”

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, King is déjà vu all over again. Once again, Chief Justice Roberts has penned a majority opinion rewriting the ACA, but with one important difference: This time, the Court’s rewrite does not even further the policy of “saving” the ACA. If the Court had ruled the other way, the ACA, while not performing well, would have remained largely intact, albeit in a less draconian form that was more respectful of states and individual liberty.
Read more »