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Federal judge strikes down Obama's massive mandatory overtime regulation

By Dan Calabrese ——--November 23, 2016

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As much as it infuriated conservatives - as well as just people who care about the constitutional separation of powers - that Barack Obama governed so much by executive orders and administrative rulemaking in his second term, it does come with a gigantic silver lining: Anything Obama did by executive order, Donald Trump can now undo in the same way.
Assuming Trump actually wants to, it will be much easier for him to defenestrate the administrative state than it will to push new legislation through Congress. But some of Obama's worst abuses of executive power aren't even going to stick around long enough for Trump to have to deal with them, and one that's been knocked out by the federal courts is Obama's massive order to increase overtime pay in the private sector. Obama thought he had the power to decide unilterally what the threshold should be to make salaried employees eligible for overtime. Yesterday, a federal judge Obama appointed said otherwise:
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, in Sherman, Texas, agreed with 21 states and a coalition of business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that the rule is unlawful and granted their motion for a nationwide injunction. The rule, issued by the Labor Department, was to take effect Dec. 1 and would have doubled to $47,500 the maximum salary a worker can earn and still be eligible for mandatory overtime pay. The new threshold would have been the first significant change in four decades. It was expected to touch nearly every sector of the U.S. economy and have the greatest impact on nonprofit groups, retail companies, hotels and restaurants, which have many management workers whose salaries are below the new threshold.
The states and business groups claimed in lawsuits filed in September, which were later consolidated, that the drastic increase in the salary threshold was arbitrary. On Tuesday, Mazzant, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled that the federal law governing overtime does not allow the Labor Department to decide which workers are eligible based on salary levels alone. The Fair Labor Standards Act says that employees can be exempt from overtime if they perform executive, administrative or professional duties, but the rule “creates essentially a de facto salary-only test,” Mazzant wrote in the 20-page ruling.
Obama's presidency was marked by his constant attempts to interfere in what should be the one-to-one relationship between employer and employee. Ordering that salaried employees have to be paid overtime if their salary is less than $47,500 a year means they're not salaried employees at all. They're hourly. That makes no sense for either party. There's a reason two parties would agree that a salary-based employment agreement is mutually beneficial. The salaried employee understands he's going to get the same pay regardless of how many hours he works, but he also understands that his compensation is based not on time put in but on output delivered.

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Not only does it make no economic sense for the federal government to mess with that, it also exceeded Obama's authority as president to do so

Not only does it make no economic sense for the federal government to mess with that, it also exceeded Obama's authority as president to do so. This is one Obama executive action that Trump won't have to bother overturning. I'd like to think Trump would have done so, but I'm not entirely confident. I get the impression that after all the criticism of Trump as some sort of evil monster, he will enjoy confounding his critics by governing as a nice guy. And while there's nothing wrong with that, I hope Trump doesn't hesitate to get rid of regulations that make no economic sense, because such action would give his media tormenters an excuse to beat him up as a worker-hating rogue. Hopefully Trump's experience as a businessman wins out in situations like this. He of all people should understand that the federal government helps no one when it sticks its nose into private economic agreements between willing parties. Even an Obama-appointed federal judge seems to know that.
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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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