Another Sweetheart Deal in the White House

Democrats still reeling from the Bush v. Gore decision in December must have cringed when President Bush announced his choice for solicitor of the Labor Department: Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In his career to date as a labor lawyer, Eugene Scalia has specialized in representing management in labor disputes related to worker safety, especially the dangers of repetitive-stress injuries. He is the leading architect of the anti-ergonomics movement, referring to repetitive-stress injuries, which afflict 600,000 American workers annually, as "junk science," "quackery," and "strange." Joshua Green observes that "Scalia is a now familiar type in the Bush administration: a policy assassin who's built a career fighting a specific set of regulations and finds himself appointed to a top position in the very agency he's long opposed."