Freedom Line Blog

Amid the flurry of inanity brought upon this nation by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, it is important to stop and smell the roses of triumph.  One arrived today when the Senate blocked, at least for now, the DISCLOSE Act. 

That act would violate the First Amendment rights of free speech and free association in its attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s correct Citizens United v. FEC decision, while effectively exempting politically powerful labor unions.   Obama, Pelosi and Reid will surely follow with their usual bromides about “the people versus the powerful,” but the fact is that the DISCLOSE Act is nothing more than a scheme to enable the powerful, namely partisan Big Labor, at the expense of everyday citizens.  It’s a welcome victory for free speech and freedom of association, and a stinging defeat for an Obama Administration that manages to pioneer new realms of cynical partisanship on a daily basis.

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has earned high praise from conservatives by making good so far on his promise to clean up the state’s fiscal debacle using established conservative principles.  Christie inherited a $2.2 billion deficit this year and a projected $10.7 billion deficit for next year (over 1/3 of the total budget size), but has managed to cut $13 billion in spending in just eight weeks.  In so doing, he has naturally enraged the usual leftist entitlement class and unionized public employees.

Notably, however, Governor Christie has attracted some support from state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who is a Democrat and leader of a local private-sector union.  The reason?  Perhaps Mr. Sweeney has recognized that the same public-sector unions whose exorbitant wages and benefits busted New Jersey’s budget also eat into the wages and livelihoods of private-sector union members who pay taxes to subsidize those public sector employees.

Now that the number of public-sector union members exceeds the number of private -sector union members, could we be witnessing the first signs of an intra-labor deathmatch?  This could be interesting…

Last week, we noted that American consumers rewarded Ford for refraining from bankruptcy and accepting federal bailout dollars by significantly boosting its share of domestic auto sales.

So leave it to unionized workers to react to Ford’s admirable success story in a very different way.  As we noted in our commentary last week, many market observers worried that Ford would face a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis General Motors and Chrysler, which did accept bankruptcy and government largess.  All three Detroit automakers had been on a decades-long course of suicidal labor and business practices, but Ford chose to right its course the old-fashioned way, in contrast to GM and Chrysler.  For this, Ford was rewarded by American car buyers.

But not by union voters, who rejected a contract that would have brought Ford’s unsustainable labor costs in line with those maintained by GM and Chrysler after their bailouts.  As noted by the Associated Press, “workers weren’t convinced they should make more concessions, since Ford avoided bankruptcy and is considered healthier than its rivals.”

So there you have it.  Behave responsibly by reviving your business without taxpayer dollars, and unionized workers will punish you for doing the right thing.  We’ll check back in with these same union voters when they exclaim shock that their jobs disappear overseas or other non-union locales.