Democratic budget-cutters

Strip down for your morning shower. On your way, pick up that big tomcat — the one that hasn’t been declawed. Speaking to the trusting 12-pound feline in a reassuring tone as you cuddle him to your naked chest, step into the shower and use your free hand to turn on the water, full blast.

You now have some idea of the kind of response you’re likely to get if you suggest to a Washington politician that the size and power of the central government need to be reduced.

And those are the Republicans.

So it’s hard to know whether to laugh or merely congratulate congressional Democrats now that — like blind pigs rooting for truffles — they’ve finally found one single federal office whose funding they’d like to trim back: an obscure Labor Department office that investigates and prosecutes … um, union corruption.

The Landrum-Griffin Act — the last major revision of federal labor law — dates from 1959. At that time, no less a Democratic icon than U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy “was instrumental in inserting title I of the act, which has been dubbed the union bill of rights,” the American Law Encyclopedia reports. That section mandates that union votes be conducted by secret ballot, that unions file reports on large payments and loans to union officers, and that all members have access to union financial records. Its provisions directly led to the creation of the Office of Labor Management Standards — now budgeted at about $47 million — the single office in the whole of the federal government that Democrats now consider a waste of money.

In the past six years, the OLMS has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and more than $70 million in court-ordered restitution of union member dues.

Just this spring, thanks to an OLMS investigation, Chuck Crawley, a former Teamsters local president in Houston, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for embezzling dues and stuffing a ballot box so he could be elected president of his local, reports John Fund of The Wall Street Journal.

Thanks to the OLMS, “Union members are also discovering the extent to which their dues money is funding lavish trips for union officials to luxury resorts and other expensive perks unrelated to collective bargaining,” says Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

Yet, while the Congress has actually added $935 million to the administration’s budget request for the Labor Department overall, the House is set to vote Thursday on a Democratic proposal to chop 20 percent from the OLMS’s modest $55 million proposed budget. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., will offer an amendment Thursday to restore OLMS funding to 2007 levels.

Since Constitutional authorization for any “Department of Labor” is hard to locate, a better approach might be to advise Democrats they missed a few offices, instead proposing that the entire Labor Department budget be trimmed by 20 percent.

But best pull on the padded suit and the heavy gloves, first.