The Real Sen. Joe Manchin, Unmasked

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has publicly protested some of President Obama’s policies, and he refused to even say whether he voted for Obama in the state’s Democratic primary. Manchin has presented himself as an independent, even conservative, Democrat since his election to the Senate in 2010. But his recent vote in favor of the National Labor Relations Board’s ambush rule unmasks Manchin. He is another Big Labor Democrat. The Huntington News is hammering Manchin for that vote.

For decades, businesses have had the guarantee that they will have the time necessary to develop their own arguments in any contest with unions as they vie for the votes of employees.  Obama’s two NLRB members were trying to change that, creating an obvious unfair advantage for Big Labor.

But boys will be boys, right?  What do we expect from Obama appointees on the NLRB?

What we didn’t expect was to see Senator Joe Manchin vote in approval of this new regulation on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  That’s right:  “Mr. Pro-Business” Manchin was right in Big Labor’s hip pocket.

What happened to Joe Manchin?  The moment he set foot in the District of Columbia, he voted for Obamacare. Then there’s the whole EPA saga, with Joe Manchin looking a lot more persuaded by Obama’s arguments against coal than the other way around.

Now Manchin must be hoping for some campaign contributions from Big Labor to be voting for a shameless attempt to treat our small businesses unfairly, just to make union bosses happy in an re-election year.

Manchin’s Republican opponent, John Raese, says he would have voted against NLRB ambush rule, and against ObamaCare, and would not have gone along with the EPA’s radical anti-business agenda, as Manchin has. Manchin, says Raese, has passed himself off as a West Virginia Democrat, but his votes prove that he is just another Washington Democrat. With Manchin voting for the NLRB ambush rule — a vote that went so far out of bounds that a federal judge struck it down this week — Raese is hard to argue with.