Ed Schultz continued his weekly tirade against Republicans Sunday, arguing for a second straight week that the GOP is engaged in an all-out war against minorities.
After accusing conservatives of wanting to “keep a minority down” on last week’s Ed Show, the bombastic MSNBC host was at it again on Sunday, accusing Republicans of “attacking minorities” in their attempt to block President Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Schultz’s latest incendiary remarks come after an effort by Senate Republicans to challenge President Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB last year. The GOP argues the move was unconstitutional and an “unprecedented power grab” by the president. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case against Obama’s recess appointments.
But according to MSNBC’s chief left-winger, the court of law isn’t good enough to settle this debate. Schultz berated Republicans for “the total destruction of the National Labor Relations Board,” charging the party with wanting to “erase out any kind of labor law.”
Of course, it’s incredibly hyperbolic to suggest any lawmaker wants to remove “any kind of labor law” – Republicans and Democrats alike know that many labor laws offer important protections for children and those working in dangerous conditions.
But Schultz is not one to shy away from hyperbole. The progressive host whined that Republicans were not “giving President Obama the nominees he wants,” before launching a diatribe against the party:
Now, some have suggested that the NLRB is actually preventing growth in our economy, pointing to recent disputes with Boeing and Cablevision as proof of the board’s own “restrictive approach.”
The NLRB filed a case against Boeing back in 2011, attempting to block the construction of a new plant in South Carolina which a Washington state union vigorously opposed. The board also criticized a Brooklyn division of Cablevision earlier this year for granting its employees pay raises and benefits in order to prevent them from unionizing. No word from the NLRB over Cablevision employees’s overwhelming 121 to 43 vote against unionization, or the positive results of a company bargaining with its employees sans union.
In the non-MSNBC version of reailty, the evidence suggests that the NLRB is often a pro-union arm of the federal government, despite Schultz’s over-the-top claims to the contrary.
See the full transcript below:
MSNBC
The Ed Show
July 7, 2013
12:05 p.m. Eastern
ED SCHULTZ: Well, folks, are you convinced yet? Do you believe that there has been an attack on labor? Those were clips from the last five years here on The Ed Show, and now we're at the pinnacle point in my opinion when you look at the total destruction of the National Labor Relations Board. This has been a systematic approach by the Republicans over years to get to this point to totally erase out any kind of labor law. You look at the number of states that are going Right to Work, and all the legislation that's being offered up by radical governors who were attacking wages, blaming middle class workers for the financial woes of each one of their states.
They want to put it on the back of the workers. They want to take away their voice in the workplace, and now what they want to do is take away the overriding board that decides labor law in this country. They want to destroy it, and the way they've done it is through obstruction, not giving President Obama the nominees he wants. And so now we're down to one member on the National Labor Relations Board that is supposed to have five appointees that are political, three Democratic and two Republican based on who's in the White House. But, of course, they won't give that to President Obama. So the last person on the labor relations board, his term will end on August 1, just a few weeks away, and then what? Do you really think between now and 2016 that the Republicans are going to step to the plate and help President Obama put together what FDR started 78 years ago? The answer is hell no. This is about attacking workers. This is about attacking minorities. This is about keeping the working folk down, concentrating the wealth, more corporate power, and a restrictive approach when it comes to growing our economy.
Now, with all of that, we have added 40 months of private sector job growth with no help from the Republicans. We'll talk about that in the next segment. But I want this country, every American, to understand that you don't have to be in a union to be affected by the National Labor Relations Board. Because if there's no overriding arbitrator, if there's no overriding board that can make decisions in disputes and make labor law and enforce things on behalf of workers, what do we have? We have a free-for-all in the economy. We have the only recourse of having what's known in the old days as total general strikes, which would be the worst thing that could ever happen to this economy. So, as so many people put the economy on the back of President Obama, what we need to realize is that, yes, there's been a bunch of filibusters in the Senate, but there has also been a systematic attack on workers, and now they're trying to strip away the institution of the National Labor Relations Board. It's a serious issue.
