Apparently, the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board has an intense dislike of Scabby, an iconic balloon — Balloon! — often used by picketing union members.
Scabby the Rat stands 12 to 30 feet tall, teeth bared and claws raised aggressively, with hungry, bloodshot eyes. The giant rodent’s sickly-looking underbelly refers to the ‘scab’ pejorative sometimes used by unions against strikebreakers, making it a global symbol of worker protest.
Courts and the National Labor Relations Board have issued rulings over three decades holding that the inflatables are permitted under federal labor laws or are symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment. But the NLRB’s current general counsel, Peter Robb, has had enough of the rat—to the point that since April 2018 he’s been looking for a case he can use to exterminate it, according to sources familiar with his thinking.
So: 800,000 employees of the Federal government have gone unpaid for almost a month, many of them reporting to work anyhow, because the First Felon is a corrupt and vain madman — and the NLRB’s General Counsel is losing sleep over a … balloon. It’s the perfect expression of the emptiness of Trump and the sort of C-team talent he attracts.