In today’s news and commentary, the Fifth Circuit hears challenges to the NLRB; the Democratic NLRB majority may be ending soon; and building trades unions criticize the Democratic party.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments in two constitutional lawsuits challenging the structure of the NLRB on Monday. In both cases, brought by Amazon and SpaceX (and discussed here), the employers argued that federal district courts had “effectively denied” the companies’ motions for preliminary injunctions against the agency by failing to rule on those motions quickly enough. It was this procedural question about effective denial, and not the constitutional merits of the cases, which occupied the panel’s attention on Monday.

Lauren McFerran, the Democratic appointee who currently chairs the NLRB, faces an uncertain future, as it is still not clear whether the Senate will confirm her to another five-year term on the Board before President-elect Trump is inaugurated in January. If McFerran is re-confirmed, Democrats’ majority on the Board will be slated to last until 2026—unless Trump takes the novel step of firing the Democratic appointees, a prospect that Kevin has covered. If McFerran’s nomination is stalled, Trump will be able to appoint two new members immediately, creating a Republican majority that could quickly move to overturn Biden-era changes such as the recently announced ban on captive audience meetings.

Post-election recriminations against the Democratic party continue, as leaders of unions in the building trades accuse the Democrats of becoming culturally alienated from their members. The leaders of the Laborers’ International Union of North America and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades have noted that Democratic support for gun control and opposition to fossil-fuel pipelines may have cost the party votes among building trades workers, who are more likely to be white and conservative than union members as a whole. Even AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler—a staunch Trump detractor—acknowledged that Trump’s kitchen-table economic messaging appeared to be “almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook.”