Clint Bolick

Clint Bolick

Clint Bolick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice, a national nonprofit educational policy group advocating school choice programs across the country. Formerly, Bolick was the vice president of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm that he cofounded in 1991.

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    • Obamacare’s Other Unconstitutional Provision

    | December 16, 2011 | 8:31 am

    Following the passage of the massive federal health-care bill, inquiring minds wanted to know the dimensions of the new bureaucracy it had created. So the question was put to the Congressional Research Service (CRS): How many new agencies, boards, and commissions were created by the law? Estimates ranged from fifty to the low hundreds. The CRS, with perhaps more research resources available to it than any other entity on earth, scoured the bill and its surrounding context, and finally came up with an answer: The number of new agencies created by Obamacare is “unknowable.”

    That is a scary pronouncement. Not only don’t we know the number of new agencies, but we don’t know which ones are the same or separate entities, what the contours of their jurisdictions are, or the extent to which they will intrude upon some of the most important and intimate decisions we make as individuals.

    Continue reading Clint Bolick…

    (photo credit: Brett Tatman)

    The War on the Secret Ballot

    | August 23, 2011 | 10:44 am

    The Obama administration has fired its opening salvo against a cornerstone of democracy: the right to secret ballot.

    Last fall, voters in four states voted overwhelmingly to amend their constitutions to protect the right of workers to vote by secret ballot in deciding whether or not to form unions. That right has been enshrined in federal law for 75 years but is threatened by bills pending in Congress.

    Nonetheless, the Obama National Labor Relations Board has filed a lawsuit against Arizona seeking to halt its protection of the right to secret ballot. Federal law governs labor relations, the NLRB asserts, and states cannot provide greater security for worker rights.

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    Save our Secret Ballot

    | July 15, 2011 | 1:19 pm

    Frustrated by the failure to enact its pro-union agenda in Congress, President Barack Obama’s administration has unleashed its bureaucratic minions at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to achieve it through regulatory fiat. The core agenda is to reverse decades of eroding union membership by eliminating the right to secret ballot in union organizing.

    The NLRB’s latest salvo is a lawsuit against Arizona. Arizona is one of four states where voters last fall resoundingly added to their constitutions the right to secret-ballot elections in union organizing. The lawsuit is the most recent of many recent cases pitting state power against federal power. The outcome will determine in large measure the amount of individual autonomy Americans will enjoy in the years to come.

    JUMP-STARTING UNIONS

    Private-sector unionization has steadily plummeted since the 1950s, when roughly one in three private-sector workers belonged to a union. As of 2008, only 7.6 percent of private-sector workers were unionized. In 2010, that number fell further to 6.9 percent. Meanwhile, the number of unionized public-sector workers eclipsed those in the private sector for the first time in 2010, with close to eight million public-sector employees (or 37.4 percent) enrolled in unions compared to slightly more than seven million in the private sector.

    Continue reading Clint Bolick at Defining Ideas…

    (photo credit: mandiberg)

    Caveat Vendor

    | April 07, 2011 | 11:53 am

    Imagine a country in which the right to a welfare check is vigorously protected—but where the government can destroy legitimate businesses and professions with impunity.

    Is it China? Russia? Cuba? A socialist utopia dreamed up by the likes of George Orwell?

    No: it’s the United States, supposedly the beacon of free enterprise for the entire world.

    But is it really? Governments at every level—not to mention unelected regulatory agencies—regularly deny individuals the basic freedom of enterprise that is every American’s birthright. Often they do so not to defend public health or safety but for naked protectionism.

    Continue reading Clint Bolick at our sister site Defining Ideas…

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