Another Sweetheart Deal in the White House

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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."