Why am I not surprised.
You've likely heard of the lock-out of longshoreman in port facilities on the West coast and how President Bush has now invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to force the workers to go back to work. There's been a lot of sloppy reporting on this case -- and we'll be saying more about that. But for the moment let me draw your attention to this. Eugene Scalia (yes, son of Antonin) is the Solicitor of the Department of Labor. He's actually not quite an appointee. President Bush couldn't get enough votes to get him confirmed so he put Scalia in the job through a recess appointment this last January, as he did with Otto Reich at State. So Scalia is the head lawyer on the government's negotiations between the Pacific Maritime Association and the longshoreman's union, the ILWU.
So far so good.
But it turns out that Scalia has a bit of a conflict. Before he became Solicitor one of his legal clients was -- you guessed it -- the Pacific Maritime Association. Click here to see the key page of Scalia's public disclosure statement, which has just been added to the TPM Document Colleciton.
