Unions Give Thanks for Trump’s Labor Pick
We don’t generally discuss national politics here at CPC World HQ – we’ve got our hands full dealing with Gov. Gavin Newsom and his confederacy of dunces in the state capitol. But let’s acknowledge some of President-elect Donald Trump’s great choices for key administration positions – including Scott Bessent at Treasury, Chris Wright at Energy, Linda McMahon at Education, Kevin Hassett to lead National Economic Council, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health.
So what’s up with Trump’s bizarre choice of Lori Chavez-DeRemer to lead the federal Department of Labor?
Never mind that she calls herself a Republican. If confirmed by the Senate, she will bring to the rest of America the union-backed policies that have made California synonymous with government dysfunction.
California’s government unions annually raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance the campaigns of politicians who, once in office, return the favor – in the form of higher taxes, theatrical overreach, and declining government services. If confirmed by the Senate, Chavez-DeRemer has said she’ll use her federal office to impose that legalized corruption in every state in the union.
The one-term Oregon House member is a co-author of the PROAct, the federal version of California’s AB 5 – the union-crafted law that destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of California independent contractors in order to herd some of them into unions. (I’ve written extensively about the victims of that policy, including the state’s once-thriving independent truckers.) She supports the federal Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, a law that, far from liberating, would force government workers to join unions and would require their government agencies to negotiate with those unions. Since 1978, that same coercive policy has wrecked California government finances, raised taxes, and blunted all attempts to reform every government agency, including the state’s worst-in-the-nation public schools.
The only people truly happy with this choice are union leaders – the very people who would gladly travel in a time machine to kill Trump in his cradle. They have universally expressed their affection for Chavez-DeRemer. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien is credited with pushing hernomination.
A few weeks ago, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten was calling Trump a fascist – an “existential threat to democracy and freedom.”
But that was then. “Now, this would be a significant appointment for Trump to make… Lori Chavez-DeRemer touted for US Labor Secretary,” Weingarten crowed on X.
You know that you’ve screwed up when Randi Weingarten praises you. If you believe as almost everybody does that parents have authority over their own children – even while at school – Weingarten says you are the victim of “propaganda” and “misinformation.” She says that allowing men to compete in girls’ sports “is the kind of protection our students need to ensure they are safe.” She declares that school choice “undermines democracy.” The woman who led the campaign to close schools during Covid now blames a decade of falling student test scores on(wait for it) remote learning during Covid.
That’s who supports Trump’s nomination of Chavez-DeRemer.
If the policy implications of this pick are terrible, the politics are worse. You don’t have to have lived in California to see that government unions account for most of what’s awful in the state. Chavez-DeRemer’s own recent political biography proves the point. When in 2022 she first won her purplish Oregon congressional district Chavez-DeRemer thought she would guarantee a second term by lining up with union leaders. That’s why she co-authored the PROAct and endorsed the anti-freedom Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Union leaders back home applauded her good sense. But as soo as campaign season heated up, they attacked her with withering attack ads.
Her opponent in that campaign, Democrat Janelle Bynum, got “strong support from state and national Democrats and the backing of powerful labor unions, including SEIU, the unions representing Oregon nurses and teachers and the AFL-CIO,” the Oregonian reported in mid-October. “Union leaders hosted a joint press conference with Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, this month, in which they cast Bynum as the antidote to Chavez-DeRemer’sfar-right extremism.”
Chavez-DeRemer lost on November 5. She failed because, like so many California Republicans in the past, she thought she could manage union leaders – sacrificed principle to (what she thought was) political expedience. The snake handled its handler.
Don’t count on the Senate to block her confirmation. It’s likely that Democrats (whose political campaigns are bankrolled by unions) will join hands with Republicans (who fear crossing Trump) in approving her nomination. Major media will celebrate this spirit of bipartisanship.“She’ll sail through – and probably with more votes than any other Trump cabinet nominee,” a dour Capitol Hill insider told me.
It’s no surprise that union-backed Democrats are celebrating this key nomination. It’s harder to understand why anyone who has watched California’s decline would join them.