Labor-union loathing for Ronald Reagan boiled over in Thursday’s Washington Post. Joe Davidson, who writes a union-sympathizing column called “Federal Insider," channeled outrage over Labor Secretary Alex Acosta putting Ronald Reagan in the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor. Davidson began:
Isn't it weird that someone who could contend for the title of America's Greatest Union Buster will be inducted into the Labor Department's Hall of Honor?
More than strange, the union representing Labor Department employees says honoring former president Ronald Reagan is shocking.
A union nominated Reagan – the Sergeants Benevolent Association of New York City – and of course, Reagan led a union, the Screen Actors Guild, in his Hollywood days. Davidson noted that SBA president Ed Mullins was proud of Reagan as the only union leader who became president, and whose "economic policies helped working people." (It had to kill the Post to allow that quote in black and white.)
But the Labor Secretary was charged with failing to note that Reagan decertified PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, because public-safety employees shouldn’t go on strike. Alex Bastani, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 12 at the Labor Department, nearly came unglued in response, calling Reagan's PATCO firings were "a cruel act of industrial violence."
Why is it liberals can't be upset at real violence from their Antifa allies, but Reagan committed metaphorical violence? If the air traffic controllers abandoned their posts, couldn't that cause real bodily harm? But Bastani was just getting started in this column:
In a bit of hyperbole, however, Bastani didn’t help his argument by claiming the firings “created the enormous division of rich and poor at third world levels, which is the root cause of the racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia that paralyzes our nation to this very day.”
Those -isms and phobias were around long before Reagan, but Bastani made a good point when he said the “temple honoring the work of men and women who sacrificed themselves to create an American middle class and who championed the causes of America’s … working poor, is not the appropriate arena for Ronald Reagan.”
Speaking of communism, Bastani also noted Reagan’s connection, as a union president, to one of the shameful episodes in recent American political history: the Red Scare.
“It is a historical fact that he surrendered the names of dues paying members to the House Committee on Un-American Activities — a Joseph McCarthy orchestrated witch hunt,” Bastani wrote. “We recognize Mr. Reagan had the right to pursue his own personal political agenda. However, he did not have the right to take these actions while representing union members who were being harassed and bullied by the federal government simply for exercising their first amendment rights.”
It was not shameful to belong to the Communist Party, run by -- ahem, today's liberals -- the dictators of Russia, manipulating our democracy! Somehow, it's never tricky to insure Soviet agents had their freedom of speech. And it's not a "witch hunt" today to investigate Russian interference in preventing Hillary's coronation, but back then, that was a "shameful episode."
MRC’s Rich Noyes reminded me that these liberals wouldn’t be outraged at an honor for Franklin Roosevelt, but this is what FDR wrote in a 1937 letter that it’s “unthinkable and intolerable” for government-employee unions to strike:
Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
Davidson concluded that this Labor Department hall of honor is for the radical left -- for Cezar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, for Mother Jones and A. Philip Randolph -- and Reagan is "not in their league." They think the Labor Department is a Liberal Department. Apparently it would be like conservatives having a fit if the Pentagon honored Jimmy Carter for his years of service in the Navy, because as president, he was weak on national defense.
