Bear in mind that Big Labor went to bat for ObamaCare in a big way throughout the months-long debate over its passage.  When Tea Party activists demonstrated to raise opposition to the legislation, unions like the Teamsters counterprotested, sometimes violently, in an attempt to intimidate conservatives into acquiescence.  Unions spent big money in the 2010 election hoping to protect Democrats from the consequences of their votes on ObamaCare, arguing that the bill would help the working class by sticking it to insurers and fat cats.

Now that the law is about to be implemented, though, it suddenly looks awful to union leaders like Teamsters president James Hoffa, UFCW president Joseph Hanson, and UNITE-HERE president D. Taylor.  The Wall Street Journal published a letter on Friday that the union leaders sent to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi expressing shock, shock that a massive and expensive government intervention would screw up the labor market:


Now this vision has come back to haunt us.

Well, they’re certainly not alone in that.  But what part of “massive government intervention” didn’t they figure out the first time around?  The letter explains:


Maybe if they’d listened to Tea Party activists instead of shouting them down, the union leaders might have figured this out in 2009.  Opponents of the bill argued all along that the incentives presented by ObamaCare would kill employer-based coverage, either by depressing hiring or by depressing hours.  We’ve gotten both since the bill’s passage, just as critics predicted.
Next, the union leaders are shocked, shocked to discover that the tax consequences of so-called “Cadillac plans” apply to Obama’s allies:



Excuse me, but this was even more obvious than the employment consequences.  Subsidies are only available to consumers in the individual insurance exchanges.  Union health plans are group plans (and partly employer coverage, as the letter points out).  They’re no more eligible for subsidies than consumers in employer plans, and they’ll get taxed just like all other “Cadillac” group plans.  This is only news to those who manned the barricades rather than reading the fine print, or really any print at all.

The union leaders who signed this letter should all resign in disgrace — not because of the letter itself, but because the letter implicitly admits that they’ve been nothing but shills for the administration’s agenda without any thought of how those policies would impact membership.  They spent millions of dollars collected from those workers to make their lives worse.

But the letter does offer one benefit to the trio — it makes them eligible for a Captain Louis Renault Award: