The NLRB is the National Labor Relations Board. As in, Labor.
To the extent you think that Obama's a Democrat, you would call that his base. And if you're a fan of political non-interference in "independent agencies," in the story below the non-political move for the White House would be not to intervene.
Instead, something else happened. Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has the sorry tale (my emphasis):
When House Republicans targeted the budget of the National Labor Relations Board last month, the agency shot back, warning that such cuts would force it to largely cease operations for an extended period of time, creating a backlog of thousands of cases.The rest of Grim's reporting contains the weaselly WH explanation. Read it if you like.
It was one of the few counterattacks from the Obama administration, which was otherwise busy proposing its own cuts and endorsing the Republican call for slashing spending -- and it didn't last long. The White House demanded that the NLRB scrub the statement defending the agency from its website, an NLRB spokesperson told The Huffington Post. ... The Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House, reached out to the NLRB and told the agency to back off and take down the statement, according to the NLRB spokesperson.
Frankly, I think this is a two-fer for the White House. They signal "preemptive compromise" to the Republicans; and they signal "we're weak, not complicit" to progressives. In the biz, they call that win-win.
GP
