What NFIB Can Do for You This Year

In a year when Washington, D.C., is clearly in bitter, partisan gridlock—posturing and fighting, but mostly waiting to see who will win the 2012 elections—it is a fair question to ask: What can NFIB really do for me this year?

By joining NFIB, you hired a team of advocates that represents your interests in your state legislature and in Congress. But remember that we are also keeping an eye on your state and federal regulatory agencies that are churning out new reg­ulations while the public and press focus on the election.

Because both legislative bodies and those regulatory agencies often go too far, NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center is busy taking both the federal and state governments to court to overturn specific rules or laws that violate your constitutional rights.

For example, while Congress continued to bicker and stew in March, NFIB was making history and headlines, arguing before the Supreme Court that the healthcare law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius. Your status as an NFIB member means you are part of that case—an undeniably historic and important moment for individual liberty. You can keep up with the latest details of the case at www.NFIB.com/lawsuit.

In this issue of MyBusiness, you’ll learn about NFIB’s action to expand another one of our federal lawsuits, this one against the National Labor Relations Board. Our suit is based on the unlawful “poster rule” that would force you to provide a paint-by-numbers unionization guide to your employees. But we recently broadened it to say that the unlawful rule is even more absurd given that the NLRB is now being governed by illegitimate appointees, who were handed their jobs by the president as so-called recess appointments when Congress was not, in fact, in recess.

The NLRB’s Big Labor-driven audacity is an ongoing problem that we’ve come to expect in Washington, but the Big Labor agenda is alive and well at the state level over issues like minimum wage increases.

Whenever you have time to lend your voice directly to NFIB’s efforts to stop harmful regulations or legislation, or elect candidates who really understand small business, we encourage you to do so. We understand, of course, the demands on your time are endless and not all of your challenges are the fault of those darned politicians. For those challenges, we offer many more resources:

•    How to protect yourself from business-driving-related liability in Rule of Law
•    Current economic trends and their impact on your business in Small Business Straight Talk
•    Important member benefits in our online exclusives, such as our free small bus­iness webinars and business resources.

We hope you’ll finish this issue of MyBusiness with the question of what NFIB can possibly do for you this year answered, very much in full.