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Feds Won't Let Airport Screeners Unionize (Leslie Miller, July 8, 2003, Associated Press)

Airport security screeners don't have the right to unionize, according to the agency handling labor issues for the federal government.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that the screeners' boss, Transportation Security Administration chief James Loy, has discretion to decide the terms and conditions of their employment. [...]

Collective bargaining rights were a sticking point in the debate over creating the Department of Homeland Security. Congress decided to let the president take away collective bargaining rights from department workers, though that decision would be revisited every four years.

Folks who are old enough will recall that it was right around this time in his presidency that the full-moon Right decided Ronald Reagan was a crypto-liberal, as evidenced by his signing a tax hike, failing to cut Social Security, and, of course, the presence of James Baker. By the time he left office, despite all the compromises he'd made and the issues he'd failed to tackle, Reagan had been beatified and no one on the Right could criticize him and expect anyone to listen. Now the same folks have determined that in George W. Bush they bought a pig in a poke, Trouble on the right?: Bush and his conservative base (W. James Antle III, July 14, 2003, Enter Stage Right):

Eugene Volokh's co-blogger Phillipe de Croy has called for a Republican primary challenge to President Bush. Paul Cella, blogging on the topic of the impending prescription drug benefit disaster, wrote "This must be why I voted for a `conservative' presidential candidate: so I can reap the glorious benefits of socialized medicine, and an expansion in the size of the federal government unlike anything since Lyndon Baines Johnson." He notes that Bush faces a lack of pressure from the organized right, which has seemed content to function as "a set of court intellectuals for a ruling party," "the handmaidens of servitude," and "the functionaries of the Servile State." Steve Sailer has been all over Bush's response to the Supreme Court's awful affirmative action ruling in the University of Michigan case. Bush can forget about libertarian bloggers; even many who normally vote Republican are so fed up with his lack of interest in limited government that they are musing about voting for the unspeakable Howard Dean.

Why this outpouring of criticism of the man many conservatives breathlessly predict will usher in an enduring national Republican majority? As a sequel to dropping serious conservative education reform in favor of giving Ted Kennedy the big-government education bill he wanted, Bush is dropping serious conservative Medicare reform in favor of giving Kennedy the big-government Medicare bill he wants. (The latter promising to be a massive boondoggle that will impose staggering costs on future generations to come.) To follow up on his decision to cave on the free speech-strangling McCain-Feingold campaign finance travesty, he is caving on Second Amendment rights by backing a renewal of the assault weapons ban. He has apparently decided that as long as the Sandra Day O'Connor pays lip service to color-blindness 25 years from now, ruling in favor of a more surreptitious regime of racial preferences is A-OK. He's willing to spend federal money on constitutionally dubious "marriage promotion" initiatives but has yet to take any proactive steps to curb the growing judicial threat to traditional marriage.

Then of course there is the steel and lumber tariffs, the PATRIOT Act, the decision to sign ridiculously bloated farm and transportation bills and the refusal to veto wasteful federal spending. Rather than address porous borders and an immigration policy that lends itself more to balkanization than Americanization, the administration treats us to Karl Rove's schemes for illegal alien amnesties. The list goes on.

We hard all this before the 2002 midterm too, until the stunning victories of dread moderates like Norm Coleman shut people up. But we get it again now because all of this is just the politics of ego: if George W. Bush didn't adopt your extreme postion on a given issue then you'll teach him a lesson by voting for someone else. Witness the absurdity of libertarians threatening to vote for Howard Dean. It's also a function of folks who've never been involved in politics, except to comment on it, who don't really get how either governance or campaigning work. The best example here is the Right's anger over the recent Supreme Court rulings. George W. Bush could give Castro-length speeches every day from now until he leaves office and it wouldn't change either godawful opinion. What it would do is make it easy for Democrats to portray him as anti-black and a homophobe. Meanwhile, if he just gets re-elected, particularly if he carries in a larger Senate majority, he's going to have appointed a massive proportion of the Federal judiciary and as many as four Supreme Court justices. Without any muss or fuss he can actually effect significant change in those two rulings, so why hurt himself politically? The Court will get a case in the next couple of years that will say that its unconstitutional to deny homosexuals the right to marry. A Court with three new George Bush justices is likely to rule differently than one with three Howard Dean nominees, no?

The Medicare Bill, like Campaign Finance Reform, is bad policy and a mistake, but both are excellent politics, desired by large majorities of the electorate and main issues that the Democrats will be deprived of. CFR is worse than a mistake; it's unconstitutional and impeachment worthy--we'd support the impeachment of every congressman who voted for it, of the president for signing it, and of any judge who holds it constitutional--but it's going to be law and it's disastrous for Democrats. Spending growth in general, but especially the dreadful agriculture bill, is way beyond what it should be. But Republicans have run against Washington spending for seventy years and it's never done a lick of good. Voters like government spending. Get over it. Until there's a systematic reform of the entire Federal government we're going to have a $2 Trillion and growing budget. There aren't even any serious conservative theorists who think that's reversible. Majorities transferring other peoples' money to themselves is in fact the rock on which conservatism predicts democracy must founder. What's the point of running against the inherent flaw in the system--you won't win. It's entirely appropriate for ideologues to oppose these things, but unclear why a politician who's interested in maintaining himself and his party in power would not just accept them. Conservatives like to claim that they are realists and common-sensical, but seem incapable of understanding that politicians must sometimes behave with political expediency.

On most of the other issues the conservative critics have just failed to understand what's going on. They're listening to Ted Kennedy and Peter Jennings instead of comprehending what the bills and regulations actually do. So, libertarians still get apoplectic over steel tarriffs while ignoring the pivotal victory they may have made possible on Fast Track Trade Authority and rapid progress on free trade agreements from Chile to Singapore to the Middle East to Africa to Australia. They aren't just ignoring the forest for the trees but for the moss under the trees. In the meantime, George Bush is the most important Free Trade activist since Ronald Reagan. The critics blindness is perhaps more explicable in regard to the No Child Left Behind law, where hatred of Ted Kennedy has made them think the GOP was had. In Fact, Mr. Kennedy realized almost immediately that it was he who had been suckered. Sure the bill spends a lot of money, but it also sets up the first national voucher program, with no fanfare. The Faith-Based Initiative too, though widely held a failed proposal, is quietly being implemented, as are civil service reforms (see the story above) that stand to completely remake the federal government. Unfortunately for these critics, federal regulations aren't sexy and don't get much news coverage, so these revolutions are generally unknown to the natterers.

Libertarians oppose things like the PATRIOT Act, TIPS, etc. But they'd prefer a second 9/11 to any intrusion whatsoever on "privacy", a position few would share and which no responsible national leader is likely ever to agree with. Governments exist to protect us from threats foreign and domestic, even if libertarians aren't reconciled to the notion.

All of which leaves just one issue that really galls the far Right and on which they are correct that George W. Bush isn't on their side: Mexican immigration. As it happens, we believe they are wrong and the President right on the issue. Concern about the "mongrelization" of our culture is legitimate, but it is we who have failed to vindicate who are at fault, not the immigrants who come here seeking opportunity and find a culture so weak that they can easily maintain their own. Let them all come, but reinvigorate the American civic religion and make them assimilate to it. This won't satisfy anti-Mexican folk, but are the Democrats going to have a nominee who's anti-immigration? If they do, President Bush would gladly trade the militarize-the-border vote for the Hispanic vote.

The journalist/activist Right may be bitching and moaning now but the next poll you see check the internals and you'll find that 96% of those who self-identify as conservative say they support the President. The "problems with the base" story is a biennial favorite and it's almost always nonsense, as now. Groucho Marx famously said he wouldn't want to be in any club that would accept him as a member. The voices being raised now are those of folks who don't want to be in a club that has any other members. They want everything their own way or they're taking their ball and going home. That's not how adults behave or how politics works. Time for them to grow up and get with the team.

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