Craig Becker is one radical dude. He claims management should be barred from National Labor Relations Board hearings on labor-management disputes, and he is a strong advocate of Card Check, the union bosses’ proposal to do away with secret ballots in workplace representation elections. None of this should come as a surprise, as Becker is the former associate general counsel for the radical Service Employees International Union and has represented the AFL-CIO in court. The son of a University of Iowa professor, he’s also a former law professor at Georgetown and the University of California, Los Angeles. In other words, he’s a product of two of the most out-of-touch milieus in American society. Only 7 percent of all private sector jobs are now represented by the unions Becker represents, and it is all but impossible to find a more uniformly left-wing group than the typical American college faculty.

So why is President Obama using his power of recess appointments — the right of a president to put somebody in an executive branch position until the next Congress convenes, which in the present case will be January 2011 — to install Becker as the deciding vote on the NLRB? The answer to that question, of course, starts with what the five-member NLRB does, which is oversee the administration of the National Labor Relations Act, the basic rule book for labor-management relations since it was signed by FDR in 1935. There is also the fact that last month Becker’s nomination fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to defeat a threatened Republican filibuster in the Senate, which left a recess appointment as the only way Obama could get his man on the NLRB.