Democrats, the MSM, and warped priorities

We all know by now how long it took for Democrats in the House and Senate to pass a non-cut and run funding bill for our military earlier this year, but there’s also at least one other part of our government that the Democrats would like to cut funding on, too, and it won’t surprise you once you find out what it is:

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law.

In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added $935 million to the Bush administration’s budget request for Labor. The only office the Democrats want to cut back is the one engaged in union oversight.

Although Congress has long insisted on copious reporting by corporations, including the burdens of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, lawmakers have been relatively nonchalant about union reporting. Unlike the quarterly filings of corporations, unions must only file once a year with the Labor Department using a free software program. They don’t have to get an independent certified audit, are only rarely audited by the government, and don’t have to follow standard accounting methods.

OLMS, the Labor office that watches over union disclosure forms, says that last year 93% of unions met its reporting requirements. But the other 7% deserve scrutiny. Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. They might want to know that in 2005, the National Education Association gave more than $65 million to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and dozens of other liberal advocacy groups that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers. In 2006, 49 individuals employed at the national AFL-CIO headquarters were paid more than $130,000. “Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining,” says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

So they wanted to ‘clean up Washington, DC’ when they took the majority, but apparently are ok with rampant union corruption. Now, if this were the other way around, and Republicans were trying to make things a little easier for big business to escape accountability, it would be on the front pages of every major newspaper across the country, and a top story on the nightly news.

Strange, the priorities of Democrats and the mainstream media. Or perhaps ‘self-serving’ would be more appropriate …

Hat tip: ST reader Sev