Al Franken

Franken Uses Inflammatory Rape Claim to Destroy Arbitration of Employment Disputes, Including Disputes Totally Unrelated to Rape

by Hans Bader on October 20, 2009 · 1 comment

in Employment, Labor, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Recently, the Senate voted to ban defense contractors — that is, much of American business — from contractually mandating arbitration of employment discrimination disputes.  The bill’s sponsor, Al Franken (D-Minn.), pushed the bill by claiming that arbitration provisions in an employment contract kept Jamie Leigh Jones from suing her alleged rapists.  But they didn’t: a federal appeals court ruled the arbitration provisions didn’t apply to Jones’ case, leaving her free to sue in court.

Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors from requiring arbitration of employment discrimination disputes and sexual assault cases, including “arbitration” of “any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment.”  The language about sexual assault was irrelevant to most employers: Lawsuits against employers for employment discrimination vastly outnumber lawsuits over sexual assault, which are a tiny fraction of all court cases, so the bill’s real purpose was to ban arbitration of discrimination cases, not to do anything for rape victims.  Few rapes occur in the workplace, as opposed to private settings like homes; and even rapes that do occur in the workplace often fall outside the scope of arbitration clauses.  (Arbitration does not, of course, prevent criminal prosecution.)

Liberal trial lawyers have long objected to Supreme Court decisions like its 7-to-2 Gilmer decision upholding contractual provisions that require binding arbitration of employment discrimination cases, even though arbitrators often rule in favor of employees and consumers, and award them substantial monetary damages (although they do permit plaintiffs less discovery than courts do; on the other hand, arbitration typically results in “lower litigation costs and expenses“).   Franken’s amendment largely fulfills their fantasy of banning arbitration in discrimination cases.

Although Franken’s amendment has a big effect on discrimination cases — and no effect at all on most rape cases — it has been falsely described ever since as an “anti-rape amendment,” and the 30 senators who voted against the amendment have been depicted ever since by liberal sites such as Huffington Post as the “Republicans for Rape“  — even though the Defense Department opposed Franken’s amendment, and even though Senators like Bob Corker said they might have voted for the amendment had it merely covered rape and violence claims, rather than a vast array of unrelated employment disputes.

Jon Stewart, for example, depicted the amendment as being all about rape, asking his viewers “How is ANYONE against this?” and suggesting that only a nut or a misogynist could do so.  (This is the same Jon Stewart who selectively edits taped interviews to make conservatives look stupid, or make them appear to say the opposite of what they actually said).  But the liberal Stewart has aimed this criticism only at conservative lawmakers, not at the Obama Defense Department (or the liberal Supreme Court justices who voted with their conservative colleagues to allow all employment disputes, including those involving sexual assault, to be governed by contractual arbitration provisions in the Gilmer case).  So has Huffington Post, whose first inflammatory article on the vote generated over 2000 comments, many of them angry and vituperative.  The inflammatory coverage has resulted in Senators who voted against the amendment receiving hate mail and angry and hateful messages.

Liberal journalists and bloggers complain a lot about the use of so-called “wedge issues,” but they themselves are the ones who typically use inflammatory wedge issues, as the Franken amendment illustrates.

Another example is the many false claims made by liberal journalists and Obama about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a subject I addressed at length here.  In the Ledbetter case, the press claimed that the Supreme Court had created a rigid 180 day deadline for suing over pay discrimination — when in fact it did no such thing.

By the way, studies show that Jon Stewart’s viewers aren’t any smarter than Bill O’Reilly’s — contrary to what liberal journalists believe.

Cutting Off Funds to ACORN Is Constitutional, and Would Protect Against Voter and Financial Fraud

by Hans Bader on September 29, 2009

in Healthcare, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Earlier, ACORN was caught in a scandal, promoting child prostitution. Both Houses of Congress voted to cut off federal funds to ACORN.  Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and other ACORN supporters argued that this was an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

Hans Von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, explains why it is perfectly constitutional to cut off funds to ACORN, under controlling Supreme Court precedent.

ACORN receives taxpayer money despite a long history of financial fraud, vote fraud, and tax evasion.

Mickey Kaus, a Democrat, notes that it was ACORN that tipped the close Minnesota Senate race to Al Franken. ACORN has long been active in voter registration drives designed to put liberals in office. It registered most of the state’s new voters, and helped put in office the Minnesota Secretary of State who presided over the controversial recount that switched the lead in Minnesota’s Senate race from incumbent Norm Coleman to Al Franken.  Some lawyers have argued that the election was stolen.  The recount process was also marred by the peculiar actions of the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which treated clear votes for Coleman as non-votes or as votes for Franken.

Far from being contrite about its actions, ACORN is now suing the whistleblowers who exposed its wrongdoing, seeking millions of dollars, and an unconstitutional injunction to silence them.

ACORN is a left-wing group that launched Barack Obama’s career as a community organizer. He has long-standing ties to ACORN, and an ACORN affiliate received received $800,000 from Obama’s campaign.  (Small wonder that Obama has turned out to be the most left-wing president in American history).

Showing as little respect for the First Amendment as ACORN, Obama recently slapped an unconstitutional gag order on a critic of his health-care plan.

Obama’s health-care plan would force states to radically increase their Medicaid spending, resulting in massive tax increases or massive deficits at the state level.

Obama’s health care plan would also raise federal taxes, break campaign promises, increase the federal budget deficit, destroy many inexpensive health-care plans, and take away important freedoms.

Cutting off funds to ACORN would not affect its many affiliates that receive taxpayer money from state and federal agencies.

Bank of America recently suspended its funding of ACORN, which has long used the threat of lawsuits, demonstrations, and regulatory complaints to shake down banks.

ACORN helped spawn the mortgage crisis by promoting “liar loans.”

ACORN stands to profit greatly from Obama’s financial-regulation proposals, which would strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act.  (The Community Reinvestment Act is extremely harmful to banks and prudent lending, pressuring banks to make risky, low-income loans.)

ACORN is a “creature of the Community Reinvestment Act” (CRA), which gives groups like ACORN the ability to shake down banks, by accusing them of making insufficient low-income loans.

Reason’s Shikha Dalmia on EFCA’s Binding Arbitration Provision

by Ivan Osorio on July 13, 2009

in Economy, Labor, Regulation

With Al Franken joining the Senate, public attention is again turning to the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). In the weekend Wall Street Journal, the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia makes the case against EFCA’s binding arbitration provision, which has not gotten nearly as much public scrutiny as its now-infamous secret ballot-circumventing card-check provision.

As she notes, many state and local governments have extended compulsory arbitration to their employees, especially public safety workers, in exchange for their giving up the right to strike — to those governments’ subsequent chagrin.

Exhibit A: Michigan.

In 1969, the Wolverine State embraced a form of compulsory arbitration nearly identical to the one proposed in EFCA to resolve disputes with its police and firefighters. Years later, Detroit mayor Coleman Young — who had authored the original law as state senator — rued what he had done. “We now know that compulsory arbitration has been a failure,” he lamented to the National Journal in 1981. “Slowly, inexorably, compulsory interest arbitration has destroyed sensible fiscal management and has caused more damage to the public service than the strikes it was designed to prevent.”

Here’s why:

This process is supposed to install a contract expeditiously. But a review of 29 arbitration cases in 2005 and 2006 by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that the average time involved in a case was almost 15 months — not the four-and-a-half months that the law prescribed, defeating its whole purpose. Moreover, because an arbitration board doesn’t have to live with the consequences of its decision, it has no reason to come up with a workable solution — just one that is politically expedient.

This kind of arrangement has contributed to the dire fiscal situations in which many states and localities now find themselves. During the 1990s boom, increased tax receipts from economic growth enabled governments to pay increased wages and benefits imposed by arbitration. But as the economy turned south, tax revenues have gone down even as those commitments have stayed the same (or even grown).

And now organized labor wants to wrap this millstone around the necks of private employers.

Should EFCA pass, the costs of compulsory arbitration in the private sector will dwarf those in the public sector. That’s because businesses, unlike government, can’t just bill taxpayers to pay off unions. They have to compete.

In a dynamic economy, a business’s survival depends upon its ability to constantly cut costs and innovate. But a company forced into binding arbitration will be frozen for two years (the duration of the initial contract) from making any changes to any aspect of its business that is covered by the contract. Literally every issue — from its 401(k) contributions to its reliance on outside labor — could potentially become subject to review by a government panel that has neither the company-specific knowledge nor the incentive to turn a profit.

In fact, if some unions had their way, 401(k) contributions would be replaced with payments into critically underfunded multi-employer union pension funds. For newly unionized companies brought into these plans, this would represent tens of millions in new liabilities. For many of those companies, it could spell doom. And for what? To subsidize organized labor’s use of pension funds for political activism.

For more on EFCA’s binding arbitration provision, see here.

For more on EFCA in general, see here.

Minnesota Vote Manipulation Likely Overturns Key Senate Election

by Hans Bader on December 18, 2008 · 2 comments

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

The Minnesota Senate election was very close:  GOP incumbent Norm Coleman led liberal ex-comedian Al Franken by just 725 votes.  As a result, Franken demanded a recount.   The Minnesota Canvassing Board is mischievously changing the result of the election by treating clear votes for Coleman as non-votes, or even as votes for Franken.   Liberal blogs like Daily Kos are already celebrating the anticipated result of the shenanigans: a Franken win.  The Minnesota Secretary of State, who oversees voting, is backed by the left-wing groups MoveOn.Org and ACORN.  ACORN has a long history of voter fraud and financial fraud.  Local election officials have also contrived to inflate Franken’s vote totals, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Seizing the Minnesota Senate seat will give Democrats a commanding majority of 59 seats in the Senate, allowing them to defeat almost all filibusters.  If the Democrats get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they’ll pass so-called “card-check” legislation, abolishing the secret ballot in elections over whether to unionize a workplace. Congressional leaders and Obama have backed card-check legislation, which could lead to intimidation and bullying aimed at employees who do not want to work in a union shop.   Clayton Cramer, who grew up in a union household, explains why the “card-check” bill favored by liberal lawmakers and Obama may lead to physical intimidation of workers, and recounts how workers in the past were subjected to beatings and worse for criticizing union conduct or declining to join a union.

The Powerline blog features continued coverage of the Minnesota Senate election shenanigans. A Bloomberg News commentary also discusses the shenanigans in Minnesota.

No to Union Auto Bailouts and Voter Fraud

by Hans Bader on November 13, 2008 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal, Politics as Usual

USA Today has an editorial opposing a massive proposed bailout for the automakers. The automakers would be leaner, more efficient, and more able to survive in the long run if they filed for bankruptcy in order to abrogate their absurdly generous union contracts, rather than being bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Airlines keep operating all the time after filing for bankruptcy. By contrast, when England bailed out its automakers in the 1970s, at great cost, the results were disastrous and unsuccessful. But the unions want Obama to support a costly taxpayer bailout of the automakers, and so he is pushing for it. Given the union-backed incoming Democratic Congress, he’ll likely get it. But Declan McCullagh explains why bailing out Detroit is a dumb idea.

The Democrats are approaching a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, having apparently picked up the Alaska Senate seat they seemed to have lost on election day. They already have 57 Senate seats, but will pick up at least one, and perhaps as many as three, additional seats. They may pick up an additional seat in Minnesota, as a result of voter fraud, as the Wall Street Journal explained yesterday. (We previously chronicled suspicious occurrences in the vote-counting process, which is overseen by an official with ties to MoveOn.Org and the left-wing group ACORN, which has a history of voter fraud and financial fraud).

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Votes Magically Appear for Liberal Ex-Comedian

by Hans Bader on November 8, 2008 · 65 comments

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

In Minnesota, votes are appearing, seemingly out of thin air, for the liberal Senate candidate (and onetime comedian) Al Franken. Attorney Scott Johnson says that “the election appears to be in the process of being stolen.”

Incumbent Senator Norm Coleman led in election-day results, but his lead keeps shrinking and shrinking, and is now down to an infinitesmal 200 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast.

For example, a bunch of new votes suddenly appeared in Minnesota’s Mountain Iron precinct. But as Attorney John Hinderaker notes, “Mountain Iron uses optical scanning, so the Coleman campaign asked for a copy of the tape documenting the ballots cast on election night. St. Louis County responded by providing a tape that includes the newly-added 100 votes, and is dated November 2–the Sunday before the election. St. Louis County reportedly denies being able to produce the genuine tape from election night, even though Minnesota law, as I understand it, requires that tape to be signed by the election judges and publicly displayed.”

(As John Lott notes, it’s doubtful that the new votes are valid, but previously overlooked, ballots. If they were, one would expect the vote totals for other candidates, not just Franken, to rise as well. But even as new votes for Franken suddenly appear, other vote totals remain almost the same. Franken is getting nearly 3 times as many “newly-discovered” votes as Obama, for example.)

Minnesota’s Secretary of State, who oversees the election process, was backed by the left-wing groups MoveOn.Org and ACORN. (ACORN has a long history of voter fraud and financial fraud).

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