Daily Archives: 9 August 2017

Jeff Flake Misunderstands

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Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) thinks the Republican Party should have put the kibosh on then-citizen Donald Trump’s birtherism regarding then-candidate and later then-President Barack Obama, and he’s right about that.  The birtherism bit was just a bit of trolling and head gamesmanship, but it spread and became a distraction for Republicans.

But on the matter of Hillary Clinton and Trump-supported and occasionally -led chants of “lock her up,” Flake misunderstands.

We shouldn’t be the party for jailing your political opponents[.]

It’s true that the Republican Party shouldn’t be that party.  However, the Republican Party should be the party of law enforcement and of putting criminals in jail or otherwise holding them to account and sanctioning them for their criminal behavior.  The political status of a criminal should not make that criminal immune to jail or other sanction for her criminal behavior.

That’s a fine line to draw, but it is drawable, and it should be drawn.  Juries are fully capable of drawing that line, and politicians should be, too.

Labor Law

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Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.

The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling.  The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.

The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.

That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.

No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.