NLRB Amendment Beaten By GOP, Dem Coalition

Source: Huffington Post

WASHINGTON - Sixty House Republicans joined with every Democrat to beat back an anti-union amendment on Thursday that would have defunded the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-era independent agency that arbitrates labor disputes. The sixty defections come as the Midwest GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are launching direct assaults on public employee unions.

Nine high-ranking Republican members of the Education and the Workforce Committee broke with their party to support the agency, including the chairman, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.). GOP hostility toward organized labor is not a new phenomenon, but the hostility has intensified since Republicans took control of the House; the party went so far as to rename what had been called the Education and Labor Committee, replacing "labor" with "the workforce."

The amendment had been introduced by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) and was beaten back by a 250 to 176 tally.

House Republicans are piling up losses in a chamber where the majority party typically rules with an iron fist. A bipartisan coalition thwarted an effort to pass an extension of the Patriot Act and eliminated money for a weapons project that House Speaker John Boehner strongly backed.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/nlrb-amendment-beaten-by-gop_n_824783.html

and the streets might be having an effect already.

I don't get it. Who are they going to get to act as their policemen, their firemen, their teachers?

Who let the GOP go to hell? The GOP!!!

That is their ultimate goal. They want to do away with all public employees. Sure, they would still have policemen, firemen, and teachers, but those people would work for private companies inside their fortified walled-in communities, while the rest of the country would be left to fend for itself.

Some conservatives and centrist Republicans are finally waking up.

The union movement is the last significant source of political organizational capability of the middle class.

Elimination of union power in America would allow the corporations to eviscerate their main opposition, the Democratic Party, and set up a virtual dictatorship in America by means of essentially one-party rule.

Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states are showing us where the right wing wants to take America. The people of Egypt have shown us what the American response needs to be if we want to prevent our country from becoming a Mubarak-type dictatorship, corrupt and repressive.

Or maybe they're feeling heat from their communities.