The business lobby is in a fury about President Joe Biden’s renomination of a soft-spoken economist named David Weil, who propounds the unacceptably radical notion that the nation’s wage and hours laws ought to be enforced. “Wages before inflation are rising for workers of all skill levels amid an historic labor shortage,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized last week (“David Weil vs. Small Business”). Businesses “don’t need a regulator whose main goal is to use coercion to raise costs for employers trying to emerge whole from the pandemic.”
Weil was administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama, and the Journal and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Heritage Foundation (which by law, incidentally, is not supposed to lobby) all seek to punish Weil for promulgating policies that Biden’s Labor Department will likely reimpose in some form whether the Senate confirms Weil or not. (As usual, a key obstacle to confirmation is Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.) These policies don’t put new burdens on business. They seek to restore old burdens from which business long ago wriggled free. Perhaps the best example is the Labor Department’s long twilight struggle to get business to take seriously its legal requirement under the Fair Labor Standards Act...
Melania Trump on Thursday (April 9) issued an unexpected public statement denying any connection to Jeffrey Epstein, pushing back against what she described as long-running false claims circulatin...