Biden's nominee for Secretary of Labor is in trouble

For good reasons

Joe Biden has had pretty smooth sailing in getting his nominees, judicial and otherwise, confirmed by the Senate. That’s because Democrats have controlled the Senate throughout Biden’s presidency, albeit by tiny margins.

For that, Biden owes Donald Trump a debt. In 2020-21, Trump undermined the GOP’s two Senate candidates in Georgia. In 2022, his weak choices for the Senate lost winnable races in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and New Hampshire.

Now, though, Biden’s nominee to be Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, faces a rocky road to confirmation. According to the Washington Post, her nomination “is at risk of failing.”

The Post notes that Joe Manchin has serious reservations about confirming Su. And since all 49 Republican Senators oppose her, if Manchin and one more non-Republican vote against her, the nomination will fail. (Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent, has not signaled how she intends to vote.)

The Post’s attempt to explain Su’s difficulty is comical. In essence, the Post attributes the problem to the fact that Joe Manchin is up for reelection in 2024 and needs the support of conservative voters in his state. It adds: “Manchin has typically been little involved with the Labor Department, aside from its mining safety regulatory division, which has close ties to his West Virginia constituents.”

That’s a pretty big “aside.” In any case, since when does a Senator need to be involved with an administrative department to oppose a nominee to head that department? Forty-four Democrats voted against confirming Gene Scalia as Secretary of Labor in 2019. Does the Post imagine that all 44 had meaningful involvement with the Labor Department?

Opposition to Su’s nomination is well founded. As Secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, she backed and/or implemented aggressive anti-business and anti-worker-independence regulations.

The group “Stand Against Su” points out:

• Su championed California Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which attempted to reclassify independent contractors as W-2 employees, essentially making it impossible for independent contractors to operate successfully in California. Although AB 5 was opposed by thousands of California’s independent contractors, Su went so far as to promise audits and investigations on impacted workers, saying  that AB 5 “will be a model for the country.”  

• Su was a vocal supporter of the FAST Act, which would give government appointees the authority to dictate conditions at independent and franchised restaurants across California. The Act threatens to rob California entrepreneurs of their autonomy over business decisions like wages, training requirements, and daily operations.

Su also has a long history of opposing the enforcement of immigration laws, from which she argues “no one benefits.” She has blasted enforcement of immigration control laws, claiming they have no impact on illegal immigration. And, to minimize the impact of these laws, she has actively worked to prevent the enforcement of immigration law in the workplace.

According to Su:

The INS war against immigrant workers creates a wholly exploited and exploitable workforce that serves the interests of corporate profit. While people have been defined as undocumented and therefore ‘illegal,’ capital has escaped such characterization.

Additional reasons why Su faces strong opposition, including the fact that she oversaw a program that resulted in massive taxpayer fund fraud in California (see below) can be found here. The Washington Post is well aware of these reasons but, because it wants Su confirmed and Republicans/Manchin to look bad, declines to air them.

The Post’s slogan is “democracy dies in darkness.” Yet it deliberately keeps its readers in the dark.

If Su’s nomination fails, it won’t be because Joe Manchin is up for reelection. Sure, Manchin tends to veer to the right as he prepares to face West Virginia voters. But Manchin’s vote isn’t enough to sink Su.

It’s telling that Susan Collins, the centrist Republican, opposes Su’s nomination. Indeed, Collins was critical of Su when she was up for confirmation as Deputy Secretary of Labor.

Collins attacked Su for the rampant fraud in California’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) system, which cost taxpayers at least $11.4 billion with another $20 billion in suspicious payments. Collins told Su:

I recognize that there has been UI fraud across the country, including in the State of Maine, but the sheer scale and scope of the fraud in California not only dwarfs that of every other state…but also seems to be directly related to directives that you issued.

Collins voted against Su’s confirmation then, as did every other GOP Senator. Let’s hope that at least two Democrats join Collins and company this time.