#rsrh Harry Reid caves on FAA Bill.

Details as I get ’em, but apparently they’re going to go with the House bill and short-term exempt the small airport closings.

I’ll explain all of this in a minute.

UPDATE: OK.  The underlying ‘problem’ with the original bill is actually a bit in the House version where union collective bargaining reform was inserted.  As the Daily Caller put it:

The FAA Reauthorization Bill, which funds the agency, undoes a rule change made by an unelected regulatory agency called the National Mediation Board (NMB) that upended nearly a century of precedent concerning union organizing elections.

Since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House, the requirement to form a collective bargaining unit in the airline and railroad industries was that a majority of workers in a class or craft had to vote for a union. This was true for decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations. But President Obama’s administration has allowed labor advocates, masquerading as unbiased government bureaucrats, to change the policy. Incredibly, what they want is to allow a majority of those voting — not a majority of workers — to be able to force a union on workers in an entire class or craft.

This passed back in April; but Reid refused to move on a Senate version because – if I remember correctly – he seems to have the special version of the Constitution that gives him the right to unilaterally demand that the House pass legislation that doesn’t contradict Harry Reid’s own whims.  Hence, no bill; and the Democrats decided to cover that up by pretending that the real issue was the loss of sixteen million dollars worth of subsidies for small airports, which was also a provision of a House-created short-term extension.

Full details are not yet available, but the basic detail to take from this is that Reid’s attempt to tell the House what to do has been smacked down.  Hence, the cave.

[This post was edited heavily, in real time.]