District Judge Rosemary M. Collyers just exploded the union-busting new workplace rules the Bush administration attached onto the Dept. of Homeland Security. She said they left unions bargaining on quicksand, tied to a set of contracts and agreements the Bush administration could change at any time. She said that a contract that is not mutually binding is not a contract. She said the new scheme is illegal, and the Bush administration can't just contravene settled law because it wants to.
Wait, has anyone told that to the President!? (yuk, yuk, yuk)
But Bush and Rove don't care whether these worker rules are thrown out, they never gave a damn about firing flexibility anyway. The genesis of the new regulations was political: Joe Lieberman thought up this popular new department, George W. Bush stood in unpopular opposition for seven months, the 2002 midterm elections loomed, Rove decided to flip their position, they realized this was the sort of killer issue that they should put Democrats (most all of whom supported the Lieberman proposal) on the wrong side of, and so they concocted a new set of worker rules so blatantly offensive, and in fact illegal, that Democrats couldn't support the bill. That's how they beat us.
So Republicans won the 2002 midterm on the back of a cynical poison pill so vile it was just ruled illegal. Their mothers must be very proud. And now the Department of Homeland Security is going to have to remake its worker regulations from scratch: an endeavor that'll no doubt take time, manpower, and attention away from more pressing matters of, you know, homeland security. But then, Bush never wanted the DHS. He wanted victory in the 2002 midterms. And from that perspective, both the DHS and the illegal worker codes succeeded wildly. What they do now isn't really his concern.
