Biden wants unity but it doesn’t appear that he’s going to put up with GOP bullsit either. At least not when it comes to “burrowing” Trump saboteurs:
A standoff between the Biden administration and the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel ended Wednesday evening in the top lawyer’s firing, according to a White House official.
The fracas over now-former general counsel Peter Robb’s tenure unfolded just hours into Joe Biden’s presidency. It began earlier Wednesday, when the Biden administration asked Robb to resign, the White House official said, a precedent-breaking move first reported by Bloomberg Law.
But Robb, a Trump appointee with 10 months left in his Senate-confirmed role, refused. In a letter to the White House, he called the request “unprecedented since the nascence of the National Labor Relations Act” and said his removal “would set an unfortunate precedent,” according to Law360.
Biden reportedly told Robb he should step down by 5 p.m. or he would be fired. By 8:45 p.m., the general counsel position on the NLRB’s online organizational chart was listed as “vacant.”ADhttps://cc3f345d8133885224f6f01199ae4d57.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
A spokesperson for the NLRB declined to comment, and Robb did not respond to an emailed request.
Labor groups celebrated Robb’s dismissal and hailed it as a welcome departure from Trump administration policies they deemed hostile toward workers and unions. Biden, who pledged on the eve of the election to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” has sought to appeal to working-class Americans and received several key endorsements from organized labor.
Advocates said they hope the action is the first of many such changes.
“This is exactly the kind of aggressive posture that I’ve been hoping to see from the new administration,” Angus Johnston, a historian and founder of StudentActivism.net, wrote on Twitter.
Robb, a former management lawyer who was involved in President Ronald Reagan’s infamous battle against the air traffic controllers union, brought a pro-business approach to the board, which is tasked with overseeing union elections and upholding workers’ rights to organize.
Republicans decried Robb’s firing and said Biden was jeopardizing the agency’s independence. Other critics pointed out that President Barack Obama did not fire Ronald Meisburg, the board’s top prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush and served out his term, which lasted more than a year after the Democrat took office.
I don’t know if being tough about this will translate to other decisions in dealing with the Trump collaborators (which means the entire GOP) but it’s a good first sign.