How Labor Scored a Surprising Win in the GOP-Controlled House |
Something unusual happened last week that didn’t attract sufficient attention. It concerned the latest in what’s been a heartening recent series of House Republican rebellions against President Donald Trump.
Congressional Republicans have bucked Trump lately by voting to release the Jeffrey Epstein files and (however briefly) by investigating whether the Pentagon’s killing of two survivors on a boat conveying drugs in the Caribbean constituted a war crime. The inside-the-Beltway explanation for this deviationism is that House Speaker Mike Johnson is too much of a weakling to keep his caucus in line. But if Johnson is a weakling now, wasn’t he also a weakling before, when he managed to keep congressional Republicans unified? A more persuasive explanation is that Trump’s approval rating, which has been trending south since Inauguration Day, has now fallen sufficiently low that at least 15 or so House Republicans fret more about losing next year’s midterm election than about incurring Trump’s blustery wrath.
The third recent instance of House Republican disloyalty, which occurred last week, was surprising because it supported labor rights. Organized labor is something Republicans (and even some Democrats) typically oppose. This vote concerned not just labor rights but labor rights for government workers, previously the target of practically every Republican from President Ronald Reagan (who in 1981 fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers) to former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (whose union-busting 2011 law Act 10 was overturned last year, though that decision is on appeal) to the majority-Republican Supreme Court’s 2017 Janus ruling giving public-sector union nonmembers a free ride on collective bargaining agreements.
The bill in question, the Protect America’s Workforce Act, would restore collective-bargaining rights that the Trump administration stripped from federal workers through a couple of executive orders and a March guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB.........