By Phil Kerpen for National Review Online

On January 4, President Obama took the unprecedented step of declaring the Senate to be in recess — although the Senate considered itself to be in session — so that he could install several appointees in key positions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While a lot of attention has been focused on the procedural defect of these appointments (correctly, as I’ve explained), there has been far too little attention paid to the most radical of these appointees: Richard Griffin.

Unlike Obama’s appointment of Richard Cordray, which was announced to a frighteningly enthusiastic crowd at an Ohio rally, the Griffin appointment was done quietly, in a written announcement. The appointment was a direct reward for the union bosses who made an enormous contribution to Obama’s 2008 campaign and will be critical to his reelection effort.

It was also a response to the administration’s failure to get card-check legislation passed.

As longtime union organizer Stewart Acuff put it: “If we aren’t able to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, we will work with President Obama and Vice President Biden and their appointees to the National Labor Relations Board to change the rules governing forming a union through administrative action.”

In 2010, Obama used a legitimate recess appointment to install radical union lawyer Craig Becker on the NLRB to do precisely what Acuff had suggested. And indeed, before Becker’s appointment expired at the end of last year, the NLRB made a number of new rules to tilt the playing field toward union bosses.

They greatly shortened the timetable for to allow union organizers to ambush employers with surprise elections, approved so-called micro-unions to allow organizers to cherry-pick very narrow classes of workers, in order to get a foot in the door, and took away the right of workers to demand a secret-ballot election in cases where employers collude with union organizers to forego one.

But with a difficult reelection on the horizon that will depend heavily on support from union bosses, this year Obama took his union pandering to another level, installing Griffin with far less scrutiny than Becker received. There was no vetting of Griffin’s background. In fact, Obama named him as an appointee only on December 15, 2011 — less than three weeks before the Obama non-recess recess maneuver. He never went through the normal background check performed by the Senate. He never filled out the usual questionnaire, or met with any Republican senators.

Griffin has the dubious distinction of being the second board member ever (Becker was the first) to join the NLRB directly from a labor union. In Griffin’s case it’s the International Union of Operating Engineers, where he was general counsel. The IUOE is one of the most chronically corrupt unions in America, with ongoing criminal investigations against several of its locals and a history of criminal misconduct.

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