Something unusual happened last week that didn’t attract sufficient attention. It concerned the latest in what’s been a heartening recent series of House Republican rebellions against President Donald Trump.
Congressional Republicans have bucked Trump lately by voting to release the Jeffrey Epstein files and (however briefly) by investigating whether the Pentagon’s killing of two survivors on a boat conveying drugs in the Caribbean constituted a war crime. The inside-the-Beltway explanation for this deviationism is that House Speaker Mike Johnson is too much of a weakling to keep his caucus in line. But if Johnson is a weakling now, wasn’t he also a weakling before, when he managed to keep congressional Republicans unified? A more persuasive explanation is that Trump’s approval rating, which has been trending south since Inauguration Day, has now fallen sufficiently low that at least 15 or so House Republicans fret more about losing next year’s midterm election than about incurring Trump’s blustery wrath.
The third recent instance of House Republican disloyalty, which occurred last week, was surprising because it supported labor rights. Organized labor is something Republicans (and even some Democrats) typically oppose. This vote concerned not just labor rights but labor rights for government workers, previously the target of practically every Republican from President Ronald Reagan (who in 1981 fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers) to former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (whose union-busting 2011 law Act 10 was overturned last year, though that decision is on appeal) to the majority-Republican Supreme Court’s 2017 Janus ruling giving public-sector union nonmembers a free ride on collective bargaining agreements.
The bill in question, the Protect America’s Workforce Act, would restore collective-bargaining rights that the Trump administration stripped from federal workers through a couple of executive orders and a March guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB. These rights were erased based on an entirely spurious national security justification. Trump’s executive orders and OMB guidance affect more than one million federal workers and constitute, in the words of AFL-CIO legislative director Jody Calomine, “the biggest single act of union busting in American history.” That’s the sort of thing Republicans used to cheer. Last week they did not.
The American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, which is the largest federal-government union—and to which the executive orders posed a mortal threat—won a court injunction in April against the White House actions. But that was stayed pending appeal. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit hearing the case earlier this week appeared likely to rule against AFGE.
Parallel to its court action, AFGE pressed for legislation in Congress to reverse Trump’s cancellation of collective bargaining agreements, and in November it won the necessary 218 signatures to bypass Johnson and bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to the House floor. No huge surprise there. Five of the signatories were Republicans, including Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who’d co-sponsored the bill with Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine. Five is about how many Republican votes labor can typically expect on a big vote in the House, and all but one signature came from the pro-union Northeastern states of Pennsylvania and New York. (The exception was Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska.)
The surprise came when the House bill came up for a vote on December 11. Every Democrat present voted “aye,” of course. But so did no fewer than 20 Republicans, including Representatives Gabe Evans of Colorado, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zachary Nunn of Iowa, and Pete Stauber of Minnesota. These congresspeople are not the vanguard of the class struggle. Miller-Meeks has a lifetime AFL-CIO score of 9 percent, Nunn of 10 percent, Stauber of 34 percent. (Evans is a freshman and therefore has no lifetime score.) Even Republican “ayes” from more predictably pro-union states often showed little support for labor in the past. New York’s Representative Nick LaLota has a 10 percent lifetime AFL-CIO score, New York’s Representative Andrew Garbarino 20 percent, and California’s David Valadao 28 percent.
“We were very pleasantly surprised by the number of Republicans that turned out,” AFGE’s Legislative Director Daniel Horowitz told me. “We did not expect such a lopsided victory.”
What does it mean?
One thing it doesn’t mean is that the Senate bill, sponsored by Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia with three Republican co-sponsors (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island) will sail through the Senate. A near-certain filibuster will require a 60-vote majority to overcome, and that will be very difficult for the bill’s backers to surmount. Still, with so much House support, a Senate victory no longer seems impossible. The Trump administration didn’t help its chances with its vindictive response to the House vote, which was, less than 24 hours later, to tear up an AFGE contract representing 47,000 Transportation Security Administration officers. This action defied a previous court ruling preventing a similar canceling of TSA union representation.
Why did House Republicans vote with AFGE? A congressional aide suggested to me that Republicans think of this less as a union matter than a federal workforce matter—and more than 80 percent of federal workers labor outside Washington, D.C. The AFL-CIO calculates that the 20 Republicans who voted with AFGE represent, between them, nearly 170,000 federal workers, including more than 23,000 federal workers in Representative Michael Turner’s Ohio district, which includes Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Which brings us to another point: Deep staters are, as AFGE’s Horowitz told me, “very varied in their viewpoints and priorities.” Excepting the U.S. Postal Service, which is semi-private and receives little taxpayer money, the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service calculates that more than 70 percent of all civilian federal employees work in agencies related to national defense, led by the Veterans Affairs Department, which employs 21 percent of the total; the Navy and the Army, which each employ about 10 percent; Homeland Security, which employs about 9 percent; the Air Force, which employs about 8 percent; and the Defense Department, which employs about 6 percent. People who work in defense-related fields, you may have noticed, tend to vote Republican.
Indeed, there’s a depressing past history of Republican politicians selling unions the rope with which to hang themselves. PATCO endorsed Reagan in 1980 (after endorsing Jimmy Carter four years earlier) because it was dissatisfied with Carter’s management of an airport trust fund. Wisconsin Operating Engineers Local 139 endorsed Walker twice, in 2010 and 2014, the second time on the condition that Walker wouldn’t support a right-to-work law. Walker signed right-to-work into law the following March.
Another consideration for Republicans is that federal unions, unlike private-sector unions, don’t negotiate pay, and by law may not go on strike. (The 1981 PATCO strike was illegal.) That makes AFGE seem a lot less threatening. “These negotiations are always hard,” said Horowitz. “They’re hard in Democratic administrations.… Usually management has the upper hand.” Much of what unions negotiate concerns the protection of federal whistleblowers who police the conservative holy trinity of fraud, waste, and abuse. Voiding a union contract undermines such protections. Another conservative value is the sanctity of signed contracts, which of course is what AFGE’s union agreements are.
Finally, there’s the matter of eroding government services as the Trump administration wages its relentless assault against federal workers, from furloughs and often-illegal firings to the elimination of DEI programs and telework, to abusive tweets from DOGE chief Elon Musk like the one that blamed “public sector workers” for mass murders under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. (In a new Vanity Fair interview, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles suggests Musk’s ketamine use was a problem.) Personnel disruptions have—duh—compromised government functions that the public depends on, from weather forecasting to wait times to visit veterans hospitals to disaster relief to food safety to disease prevention. To whom do people complain when they don’t get the help they need? To their member of Congress, of course.
It remains to be seen whether these factors will be sufficient to push the Protect America’s Workers Act through the Senate. Also uncertain are the larger implications for the labor movement. But public approval is at a historic high for labor and at a historic low for just about every other institution in America. One August survey found public trust 20 points higher for labor unions than for Republicans, and 19 points higher than for Democrats. Maybe—just maybe—last week’s House vote means that Republicans are noticing that, even as Trump’s approval ratings fall, Republican approval for organized labor stands at a relatively robust 41 percent. Is it too much to hope that Trump’s continued abuse of federal workers will provoke a full-fledged revival of American labor to bring him down? Yeah, probably. But wouldn’t it be delightful to witness MAGA get defeated by the working class?
