PrintJanuary 17, 2009
Obama's ignorance of the law
Jennifer Rubin writes at Commentary Contentions about President-elect Barack Obama flub on labor laws:
The Washington Post’s editorial staff’s report on its visit with the President-elect includes the following paragraph:
On the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unions to organize by obtaining a majority of signatures from employees in a workplace rather than having to win secret-ballot elections, Mr. Obama signaled willingness to consider other mechanisms to address the concern that employers unfairly use the current process to intimidate workers not to join unions. And he seemed in no hurry to have Congress bring it up. “If we’re losing half a million jobs a month, then there are no jobs to unionize, so my focus first is on those key economic priority items,” Mr. Obama said, declining to state whether he wanted to see the issue debated during his first year in office.
It would be churlish to point out that federal labor law already [2] prohibits employers from interfering with employees’ union activities or intimidating them in the course of union elections (no promises [bribes or rewards for voting against union representation], spying, interrogation, or threats — we [3] labor lawyers tell our clients).
If only this were the first and only flub about the law by Barack Obama who was acclaimed as the president of Harvard Law Review, constitutional scholar and professor. The campaign and media routinely all but depicted him as the next scholar-president (Woodrow Wilson Two?). In fact, Barack Obama has a long history of getting the laws of the land wrong-something the media always criticized George Bush for doing (in fact, as the recent FISA court ruling indicates, Bush did get the laws right more often than the media and Democrat partisans gives him credit for.
Here is an article I wrote last year revealing a myriad of instances in which Barack Obama “misstated” or “misinterpreted” or just plain got wrong the laws. The media seems singularly uninterested and uncurious about these mistakes made by the man who will in a few days will promise to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Of course, the oath also qualifies this promise by stating that the person making the oath will do so to the best of his “ability."
