Solidarity Forever Gets a Rewrite as Unelected Hill Staffers Seek To Unionize

Employees tell actual members of Congress to pass a climate bill that staffers claim to have crafted.

AP/Mariam Zuhaib
Here’s hoping the new GOP House leadership starts off by reopening the oil and gas spigots. AP/Mariam Zuhaib

Democratic staffers in the House are seeking more power, money, and even a say over legislation — changes that can only come at the expense of We the People. 

According to Legistorm, which tallies data for Capitol Hill, the average House member has a team of 27 and each senator 70, a total workforce of 17,358. As our legislatures have grown in age — this is the oldest Senate in history — staffers have amassed more responsibility for executing the duties of high office.

This is already more influence than possessed by any private citizen in the hands of people who never stand for election and aren’t subject to rules governing lobbyists, and they want more.

Last week, more than 200 staffers sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, Democratic speaker of the House, and Charles “Chuck” Schumer, Democratic majority leader in the Senate. Described by CNN as “demanding … a climate and clean energy package,” the letter began, “We’ve crafted the legislation necessary to avert climate catastrophe. It’s time for you to pass it.”

Staffers, as anyone who watched “Conjunction Junction” knows, are not empowered to write bills in our republic. They serve the representatives who in turn serve the people. While the letter garnered praise from the left because it advanced their agenda, a reverse gambit by conservative staffers would face the obvious question: “Who elected them?”

What’s sauce for the GOP goose is sauce for the Democratic gander. Hill employees have no more right to petition the government for redress of grievances than their fellow citizens who work jobs far from Capitol offices. Imagine Detroit assembly line members demanding Henry Ford build a car they preferred and presuming to include blueprints. He would fire every last one of them.

Yet today, autoworkers are protected by union contracts and cannot be so easily let go. What would congressional employees do with such immunity? We may soon learn the answer. On Monday, 85 of them working for eight House Democrats filed paperwork to unionize, a first in the nation’s history.

Their grievances include pay, hours, and working conditions — the same complaints their bosses level at private businesses, especially when lobbying for hikes in the minimum wage. If Democrats are indeed hypocrites on these topics, those who answer their phones, write their speeches, and fetch their coffee may have legitimate gripes.

Yet if they gain collective bargaining privileges, there’s trouble ahead, because their union would employ the same tactics as private sector counterparts. It benefits unions to call strikes when their hands are strongest, meaning at the worst possible time for their bosses — in this case, the American people.

Imagine those 17,358 chiefs of staff, secretaries, and advisors walking off the job at a moment of national crisis and you have a glimpse of a unionized legislative branch. Fearing such power, Big Labor once opposed federal unions. George Meany, longtime president of AFL-CIO and among its founders, said, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” because government is negotiating with itself.

This is why, as I wrote in a recent column, President Reagan refused to cave to the air traffic controllers of Patco in 1981, and why President Franklin Roosevelt likewise opposed public unions. “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” FDR wrote in a 1937 letter.

“The desire of government employees for fair and adequate pay,” etcetera, “is basically no different from that of employees in private industry … but meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government.”

As our federal bureaucracy has grown beyond the scope envisioned by the Founders, our representatives have retreated from us behind a moat filled with nameless, faceless people. Yet we are a government of laws, not of staffers. If congressional employees seek to craft legislation or change the way the Capitol does business, they have but one path available: run for and win elective office.

There can be no end run around the Constitution, no matter how much they may wish to goose the Congress to act.


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