Senate Democrats tried hard at the nomination hearing for President Trump’s labor secretary nominee, private sector management-side attorney Eugene Scalia, to portray him as too beholden to corporations to effectively represent workers’ interests.
Several also questioned whether he would defend workers facing sexual discrimination. Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, defended his record, pointing to his work during the George W. Bush administration as the department’s solicitor as evidence that he would defend rank and file workers.
“Instead of nominating a secretary of labor, president Trump has nominated a secretary of corporate interests” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “If there is one consistent pattern in Mr. Scalia’s long career, it is hostility to the very workers that he would be charged with protecting and the very laws he would be charged with enforcing if he were to be confirmed.”
Murray cited Scalia’s role in striking down the Obama Labor Department’s “fiduciary rule” as evidence against him. The rule would have required all advisers managing tax-privileged retirement accounts to act in their clients’ best interests. Scalia was one of the attorneys retained by the Chamber of Commerce in 2017 when it challenged the rule in court. The Chamber argued the rule clashed with existing regulations and involved a regulatory change that only Congress could approve. A federal court agreed and vacated the rule last year.
Murray argued that the ruling put “billions” worth of workers’ retirement savings into jeopardy. “It was a common-sense rule that protected workers retirement savings by simply requiring financial advisers to put their clients’ interests ahead of their own,” she said.
Scalia defended himself by referring to his time as the Labor Department solicitor during the Bush administration, the third-ranking official at the department. “Then, as now, I was coming to the department from the private sector, where I had advised and represented businesses regarding employment matters,” he said. “But once at the department, I had new clients, new responsibilities and, above all, I had a public trust. I am proud of the actions I took before as a solicitor to further the department’s mission.”
The nominee cited his efforts to resolve a labor dispute at West coast ports that threatened to cripple the economy. “My goal was to act with neither favor neither towards the company nor towards to the union but to resolve the dispute,” he said.
Several Democrats pressed Scalia for his views on gay rights. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy dug up an opinion column Scalia wrote in 1985 on the subject. In the column, Scalia wrote, “I don’t think we should treat it as equally acceptable” but also said he wasn’t sure where he stood on the issue of rights. Murphy asked if Scalia’s views had changed in the following 35 years. Scalia said that they had and that “I wouldn’t write that today.”
Sen. Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, asked Scalia if he believed the 1964 Civil Rights Act prevented discrimination based on sexual orientation. Scalia noted that President Barack Obama had updated the Labor Department’s mandate to include sexual orientation and that Trump reaffirmed that guidance. “That is a rule I would be charged with enforcing. I would not hesitate to do so,” the nominee said.
[Also read: Trumka says labor department nominee Scalia ‘has only gotten worse’ since Bush administration tenure]
