Labor nominee

Card check legislation remains the Holy Grail for Big Labor. With union membership in a free fall outside the public sector, labor organizations want to rig the game by making it more difficult to defeat organizing efforts.

But the card check proposal -- which would all but eliminate secret ballot elections in union organizing campaigns in favor of an employee "check-off" procedure -- doesn't have enough votes to get through Congress.

The next best thing? Pack the five-member National Labor Relations Board with those sympathetic to the organized labor agenda, winning administratively what can't be achieved legislatively.

That's why Democrats and their union benefactors have pushed for more than a year to get Craig Becker a seat on the NLRB. Mr. Becker has been an associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union since 1990, and he was previously counsel for the AFL-CIO. It's no secret where his sympathies reside when it comes to card check.

For instance, the Society for Human Resource Management notes that the National Association of Manufacturers found a 1993 law review article by Mr. Becker in which he suggests "employees should be compelled to join unions and that employers should not be allowed to restrain union elections." Mr. Becker has also written that unions are necessary to "escape the evils of individualism and individual competition and contract."

Workers of the world, unite!

Last Thursday, a Senate committee sent Mr. Becker's nomination to the floor on a 13-10 party line vote. But on Tuesday, Senate Democrats failed to muster the 60 votes necessary to move Mr. Becker's nomination forward.

Democrats are upset. But it's worth noting that the board has operated with only two members for the past two years, in part because organized labor succeeded -- through Senate Democrats -- in blocking George W. Bush's nominees to fill the vacancies. What goes around ...

And so hostile is Mr. Becker to business interests that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- for the first time in 17 years -- actively opposed his nomination. "The NLRB has the ability to unduly increase union power and leverage without intervention by Congress," said Randel K. Johnson, the chamber's vice president for labor, immigration, and employee benefits. "Confirming (Mr.) Becker will tilt the balance in labor law dramatically in favor of union special interests."

Presidents deserve wide latitude in filling executive branch positions. But given his far-left philosophical leanings, the possibility that Mr. Becker might use the post to help organized labor impose its agenda through the back door -- without congressional consent -- was a real concern.

Senate Republicans did the right thing in keeping Mr. Becker off the National Labor Relations Board.