House Edu­ca­tion and Work­force Chair­man John Kline (R‑Minn.) con­tin­ues to request inter­nal doc­u­ments, notes and com­mu­ni­ca­tions on a pend­ing case being decid­ed by judges at the NLRB. Since the NLRB has judges and issues bind­ing rules, this is akin to mem­bers of Con­gress ask­ing Supreme Court jusitces for their inter­nal doc­u­ments while they hear a case. On two sep­a­rate occa­sions in March, Chair­man Kline request­ed doc­u­ments relat­ed to a case against the Spe­cial­ty Health­care and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­ter. Then, on May 11, Kline wrote once again to NLRB Chair­woman Wilma Lieb­man. The NLRB has refused to hand over the documents.

As Slate Reporter Dave Weigel, who has cov­ered the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment exten­sive­ly, wrote this week , ​“It’s true that Repub­li­cans want to stave off the (remote) pos­si­bil­i­ty that right-to-work states are forced to union­ize by court cas­es. Their vision­ar­ies, though, think they’ve got­ten momen­tum from the defeat of EFCA and the vic­to­ry in Wis­con­sin, and see a day when they can repeal part of the Wag­n­er Act or at least defund the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board.”

WASH­ING­TON, D.C. — Repub­li­cans in Con­gress con­tin­ue to search for ways to inter­fere with the qua­si-judi­cial Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board (NLRB), the fed­er­al agency which medi­ates labor dis­putes and enforces labor law.

“The Board should be sub­ject­ed to prop­er over­sight. But the Com­mit­tee must be care­ful not to mis­use its over­sight author­i­ty to influ­ence, or risk the appear­ance of improp­er­ly influ­enc­ing, the out­come of pend­ing cas­es,” wrote Rank­ing Demo­c­rat George Miller (D‑Calif.) in a let­ter to Chair­man Kline. ​“I strong­ly feel that this request may jeop­ar­dize the due process rights of the par­ties to the case and would have the same chill­ing effect on adju­di­ca­to­ry delib­er­a­tions as ask­ing for the inter­nal delib­er­a­tions and mem­os of any oth­er court in the midst of its deci­sion mak­ing process.”

The NLRB case on Spe­cial­ly Health Care and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion is impor­tant, since it is expect­ed to rede­fine how bar­gain­ing units are defined by the NLRB. The case would allow mul­ti­ple bar­gain­ing units that work in close prox­im­i­ty to be defined as one bar­gain­ing unit. Cur­rent­ly, employ­ers are able to sti­fle union dri­ves by keep­ing a work­force defined as only a few indi­vid­u­als in one loca­tion when they employ many work­ers in close prox­im­i­ty to that bar­gain­ing unit.

If one bar­gain­ing unit orga­nizes, employ­ers sim­ply close down that bar­gain­ing unit and ship it to near­by non-union bar­gain­ing units. By allow­ing many bar­gain­ing units in a close geo­graph­i­cal area to orga­nize as one bar­gain­ing unit, they make it more dif­fi­cult for an employ­er to shift work to a nonunion facility.

The Kline episode is not the first time that House Repub­li­cans have attempt­ed to inter­fere with the NLRB delib­er­a­tions. On both Feb­ru­ary 11 and April 6 of this year, Repub­li­can Mem­bers of the House Com­mit­tee on Edu­ca­tion and the Work­force have ques­tioned NLRB offi­cials, includ­ing Chair­woman Lieb­man and Act­ing NLRB Gen­er­al Coun­sel Lafe Solomon, about the pend­ing Spe­cial­ty Health­care and Reha­bil­i­ta­tion case.

On oth­er occa­sions in pub­lic state­ments, Repub­li­can mem­bers of the com­mit­tee have open­ly crit­i­cized the case, sid­ing with the anti-union posi­tion of the com­pa­ny in the case. All of this comes against a back­drop of Repub­li­cans who attempt­ed to impose mas­sive cuts on NLRB’s bud­get ear­li­er this year.

The attacks on the NLRB and inter­fer­ence with its cas­es show that, as Slate’s Weigel argues, Repub­li­cans in Con­gress are try­ing to roll back the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act. By ques­tion­ing and inter­fer­ing with every judi­cial action the NLRB takes — whether the Boe­ing case or the Spe­cial­ty Health­care case— Repub­li­cans are try­ing to intim­i­date the NLRB from enforc­ing its man­date of adju­di­cat­ing and enforc­ing labor law.