Colorado’s Bill Ritter is probably Big Labor’s favorite governor these days because last week he asked “howhigh” when the union bosses told him to jump on extending collective-bargaining rights to state government employees.
Ritter responded by signing an executive order, thus effectively going around the state legislature. With Ritter’s government by fiat, the bosses don’t have to waste any more time or dues money trying to persuade legislators who answer to taxpayers to let the unions take over Colorado’s 32,000-employee state bureaucracy.
Now, even the liberal Denver Post is calling Ritter a modern-day “Jimmy Hoffa,” a “toady to labor bosses” and “a bag man for unions and special interests.” And that was just in the introductory paragraphs of a rare front-page editorial by the Post last Sunday.
Nobody should be surprised by this development because Big Labor and its obedient subjects in the national Democratic Party have decided to make Colorado the showcase for their campaign-imaging plans for the nation. Just as the bosses have been pushing hard on Democrats in Congress to pass the so-called “Employee Free Choice” legislation that would deprive workers nationwide of the right to a secret ballot in union representation elections, so have they been pushing Ritter to clear the decks for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Colorado.
Ritter disappointed them earlier this year by vetoing their pet bill to abolish secret-ballot votes to decide how union dues are assessed. The new Ritter executive order is his way of getting back in the union bosses’ good graces.
No matter that it meant throwing overboard his promise to be a governor who brought business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, together at the same table.
Denver was selected for the convention because Ritter supposedly exemplified the practical-minded, action-oriented approach to state government the Democratic Party hopes to project on the national level.
Ritter was thus a key element of the national Democrats’ plan to position their party and candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign as voices of moderation and efficiency. Instead, Ritter now has exposed the party as beholden to Big Labor and government bureaucrats.
In other words, as the Post put it, Ritter’s previous promises of moderation were “nothing more than a sham,” and he “has squandered his future in order to keep his backroom promises to a few union
bosses.”
Actually, the union bosses never went away; the Democrats just managed to keep them hidden. Ritter’s executive order shows it’s business as usual with the Democrats.
