Tag Archives: labor unions

Who Is Ketanji Brown Jackson?

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President Biden has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. Recently The Daily Wire posted an article about some of the items Judge Jackson has supported in the past.

The article reports Judge Jackson’s stand on various issues:

Abortion: Ketanji Brown Jackson represented NARAL Pro-Choice America, the League of Women Voters, and the Abortion Access Project of Massachusetts during her time in Boston’s Goodwin Procter law firm. In 2001, she helped write an amicus brief supporting a Massachusetts law that barred pro-life advocates from setting foot within six feet of any individual or vehicle that is within 18 feet of an abortion facility. Jackson’s record has earned her the fierce opposition of female leaders in the pro-life movement.

…Crime: Ketanji Brown Jackson served as vice chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission during the Obama administration. In April 2014, the commission propounded the “Drugs Minus Two” rule, which lowered the punishment for all drug-related crimes by two offense levels. The rule, which applied to an estimated 46,000 convicts, allowed judges to reduce convicts’ drug sentences by an average of two years and one month. “The result of the Sentencing Commission’s proposal will be to reward drug traffickers and distributors who possessed a firearm, committed a crime of violence, or had prior convictions,” wrote Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and then-Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) at the time.

Immigration: In September 2019, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a 120-page ruling (Make the Road New York v. McAleenan) that the Trump administration could not expand its use of “expedited removal”: that it could not fast-track the deportation of illegal aliens who had been in the country less than two years.

…Funding teen sex programs: When the Trump administration cut off $200 million in federal funding to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which teaches children as young as 10 to use condoms and other contraceptives without emphasizing abstinence, Judge Jackson ruled that the funding must continue.

…Government bureaucracy and labor unions: In 2018, President Donald Trump issued three executive orders that would reduce the power of public sector unions and make it easier to fire employees for poor performance. They also ordered employees to spend at least 75% of their time on “agency business.” Trump limited the use of “official time,” which allows government bureaucrats to use government resources to conduct union business during working hours, at taxpayers’ expense.

He also said the government would not negotiate with labor unions on issues where it was not legally required to do so. In August 2018, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 119-page decision eviscerating those orders, denying most of Trump’s actions (American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump). She admitted that, while Trump’s action did not “specifically and directly conflict with individual statutory prescriptions” (i.e., he did not violate the law), it so “diminishes the scope of bargaining” that, it seemed to Jackson, Trump’s orders are no longer “a good-faith effort.” The D.C. Court of Appeals once again overturned Jackson’s decision, ruling that Jackson lacked jurisdiction to rule on the case.

Please follow the link to the article to read all of the notes on Judge Jackson’s previous decisions. She is not someone who is going to put the U.S. Constitution above her own political agenda. I suspect she will be confirmed, but that is not good news for America.

Common Sense From An Uncommon Source

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Yesterday Just the News posted an article with some interesting news about vaccine mandates. Americans seem to be waking up to the fact that vaccine mandates could be the prelude to some serious losses of freedom.

The article reports:

COVID-19 vaccine mandates are provoking an unlikely set of opponents: Labor unions.

Long known as a generally left-of-center cohort, unions — especially teacher’s unions — are not a social force one would expect to mount a sustained opposition against such mandates, which have been growing in number in recent weeks. Yet a broad, unaffiliated coalition of unions is signalling its intent to oppose the mandates, at the very least for their own members. 

New York State United Teachers — a major educators’ union with over 600,000 members — said in a statement this week that it was opposed to proposals to make COVID-19 vaccines a mandatory condition of employment. 

“We have advocated since the beginning of the year that any educator who wants a vaccine should have easy access to one,” the group said. “We would support local efforts to encourage more vaccinations, such as through programs that require that those who are not vaccinated get tested on a regular basis. 

“But it’s critical that districts come up with plans to make testing available on-site and at no cost. What we have not supported is a vaccine mandate.”

The article continues:

Opposition has not come solely from the educational sector. Henry Garrido, the executive director of AFSCME’s District 37 in New York City, told local media that the union is “absolutely against an absolute mandate to vaccinate everyone.”

Healthcare unions, meanwhile, have also stated their opposition to mandates. 

“Mandating vaccination is not, nor will it ever be, the answer,” George Gresham, the president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, told media this week. 

“As democratic organizations, unions will generally do what their members want,” Jack Fiorito, a management professor at Florida State University who specializes in labor issues, told Just the News this week.

“Surely there are some groups of union members with a majority who are ‘anti-vax,’ and thus their union will likely take an anti-vax stance,” he said. “Even in unions that are pro-vaccine, there would be concern for the rights and wellbeing of those who may not be able to get the vaccine for health reasons (for example, due to some other health problem, vaccine sensitivity, etc.)”

We need to remember that this is an experimental vaccine. I suspect there will be a real push to approve the vaccine within the coming months, and that approval will  negate the argument that the vaccine has not been approved.

A website called uspharmacist.com notes:

“Since 2010, most novel vaccines approved by the FDA required about 8 years of clinical development and were based on evidence from a median of 7 clinical trials, including at least 2 pivotal efficacy trials that were randomized, masked, and used a comparator group,” the authors conclude. “These pivotal efficacy trials enrolled a median of 5,000 patients, who were followed up for serious adverse events for at least 6 months. Given the urgency of developing a COVID-19 vaccine, trials will need to be larger than those supporting prior vaccine approvals and include sufficient follow-up time for emergence of adverse effects.”

At some point all of us need to ask ourselves why we are even talking about a vaccine mandate for a disease that has proven treatments. We also need to ask why immunity in those who have recovered from the disease is not taken into account. And finally we need to ask ourselves why there is such determination by the government that everyone get vaccinated with a vaccine that has not been fully tested. None of this is logical.