Unions buy their way into the White House

 

Mark Hemingway writes this article at the Washington Examiner:

**Note: Emboldened areas added to focal points to original article**

March 31, 2010

After spending $400 million to elect President Obama and expand the Democratic majorities controlling Congress, Big Labor unions now find they have nearly unprecedented access to lawmakers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In fact, representatives of the powerful Service Employees International Union are in the White House every day. According to White House visitor logs, SEIU President Andy Stern was the second most frequent individual visitor to the White House in 2009, with 36 visits.

Stern’s right-hand woman, SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger — aka “the Queen of Labor” — was first with 39 forays into the White House to visit with Obama and other senior administration officials.

Some critics would argue that giving such open access to special interests seeking favors ought to be criminal — and in Stern’s case it might even be. Stern is not a registered lobbyist, and there’s an open criminal investigation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office into whether he’s illegally lobbying the White House. Union bosses like Stern aren’t known to be fond of having tea in the Red Room.

But the SEIU’s influence in the White House extends far beyond frequent visits. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama frequently railed against the pernicious influence of lobbyists, saying, “Lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.”

Somehow, SEIU’s Patrick Gaspard slipped through the cracks. Until becoming Obama’s White House political director, Gaspard was one of the SEIU’s top lobbyists. His predecessor in the White House slot was Karl Rove, known as “the architect” of President George W. Bush’s two election victories.

The SEIU isn’t the only union with heavy sway at the White House. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has visited the White House at least 14 times, according to White House visitor logs. Recently, it was reported that the White House called Trumka in for an emergency March 17 meeting that turned out to be critical to gaining passing of Obamacare.

Desperate for votes for the controversial proposal, Obama needed Trumka to sign off on a new provision in the legislation. Sure enough, the next day the Congressional Budget Office score came in, and analysts soon found that unions had been well taken care of in the legislation.

A proposed excise tax on expensive health insurance or so-called “Cadillac plans” threatened to hit union members hard, especially officers like Trumka who usually have to-grade, union-paid health benefit plans.

But in the final version of health care reform legislation, the threshold for when the tax took effect had been significantly raised. Further, the tax’s effective date was pushed back to 2018, leaving plenty of time for Democrats in Congress to find new ways to make unions exempt.

The day after Trumka’s visit, and not coincidentally, the Associated Press reported that “the nation’s largest labor federation is strongly endorsing the Obama administration’s health care overhaul bill and plans to push wavering lawmakers for support.”

And there’s no sign that union influence will wane as long as Obama is in the Oval Office. Though it was decried by the Left, the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance decision gives unions free rein to spend unlimited amounts of money and other resources in congressional and presidential elections.

The AFL-CIO imposes fees on members to pay for political spending as it sees fit. And even though the SEIU has a dangerously unfunded pension plan, the union has $94,578,779 in outstanding loans with Bank of America — much of that borrowed money used to finance political activities. If you run a business, good luck getting away with spending money on political causes in such a coercive or reckless fashion.

All this access may not come cheap, but fortunately for them, unions are awfully good at persuading Democrats to make the rest of America pay for their bennies in the end

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Unions-buy-their-way-into-the-White-House-89556382.html#ixzz0jrrERQaO

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