< Scott Walker's Anti-Union Push May Not Prove So Easy As President

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Chutzpah is what some people saw in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker when he took on labor unions in his state. Now he is trying to revitalize his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, and he is doing it by taking on labor unions nationally. Here's NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea.

DON GONYEA, BYLINE: As a presidential candidate, Scott Walker has sometimes stumbled when talking immigration or foreign policy, for example. But yesterday, at an event in Las Vegas, he returned to the issue that made him famous - his anti-union push in Wisconsin a few years ago.

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SCOTT WALKER: There was more than a 100,000 protesters that occupied our state capital, and we didn't back down. They issued death threats against me. There were threats against my family. We didn't back down.

GONYEA: What Walker is proposing would be an all-out assault on labor unions across America. As president, he would do nationally what he did in Wisconsin, where bargaining rights of public sector unions were slashed and labor clout overall has been diminished. It's Scott Walker versus big labor.

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WALKER: And we took on the big-government union bosses. And we went big, and we went bold.

GONYEA: Union bosses, that's a term he used more than a dozen times in his opening statement. Currently 25 states have so-called right to work laws where workers can't be required to join the union and pay dues. Walker says he'd expand that to be federal law. He says he'd get rid of the National Labor Relations Board, which was created 80 years ago during FDR's first term in the White House. But despite Walker's promise, Angela Cornell, a specialist in labor law at Cornell University, says eliminating the NLRB is not as easy as Walker makes it sound.

ANGELA CORNELL: It's a statute that's passed by Congress. So it's not something that can simply be eliminated through an executive order. It's a statue, and it's the will of Congress, and it's been in place since 1935.

GONYEA: Also, Walker paints the NLRB as little more than a tool for pro-labor liberals. But in reality, it has, at times, been used by Republican presidents to undermine unions. That was true during the George W. Bush administration. And Walker pledged to do away with unions for federal workers. Again, to do so would require congressional action. In fact, to carry out both of these promises, a President Walker would need GOP control of Congress and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Charles Franklin of Marquette University in Wisconsin has been watching Scott Walker's career for years. He says this seems calculated to let candidate Walker sing a song he knows well.

CHARLES FRANKLIN: I think it is, in a way, Walker playing his greatest hit, especially after a summer in which he's had difficulty finding a theme and sticking to that theme.

GONYEA: For Walker, he hopes his anti-union push will give him the second look from Republicans that he needs. Don Gonyea, NPR News.

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