NLRB escapes elimination, but budget to be slashed

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4774

21 February 2011

WASHINGTON - By a 250-176 margin, the GOP-run House voted in the wee hours of Feb. 17 to keep, not abolish, the National Labor Relations Board. But the failure of the amendment to kill the agency still left it facing a 17.6% funding cut for the year ending Sept. 30.

If that cut, part of the massive money bill lawmakers debated through the week of Feb. 14-17, makes it through Congress and Democratic President Barack Obama, the agency would have to furlough its workers for two months, a spokeswoman says.

Every one of the 190 Democrats voting opposed killing the agency, which oversees and rules on labor-management relations for most U.S. industries and workers. Republicans voted 176-60 to kill the NLRB.

The move to eliminate the NLRB, offered by Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., was so extreme that even Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., an ardent foe of workers’ rights and new chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, voted “no.”

So did every Republican representative from Wisconsin, whose GOP governor, the same week, tried to abolish collective bargaining for public workers. That “no” tally included House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who is leading the GOP’s spending-slashing brigade.

FULL story at link.

[bbinacan]

1. Will it pass the Senate? n/t

[sofa king]

3. Hell, no!

The Republicans aren't getting anything, except that which we also feel the need to cut, but want them to take the blame for it. I don't think this is on the list.

Remember all those rights we all signed away to keep ourselves safe? Well, shutting down the government lets the President declare a national emergency, and then do anything he wants from setting wage rates to removing people from their homes to providing universal health care as an emergency service. Worse, this President is competent enough to execute those laws, rather than merely frighten the opposition with them.

The President only needs to deny that he's entertaining such a thought, and everything is on the table again. Everything.

[AlinPA]

2. 176-60 republicans voted to kill the National Labor Relations Board. The fact that this came

to a vote shows how far the republicans have come back from "being dead" in 2009.

We have a lot of work to do before 2012.