The leftosphere got a scary report from their media partners today.
Public sector unions just had a simply terrible day in the Supreme Court on Monday. Justice Antonin Scalia, the justice who seemed most inclined to agree with them prior to oral argument, took a hard turn against them within just a few minutes of argument. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is normally this closest thing this Court has to a swing voter, appeared to grow increasingly angry with the unions as the argument proceeded. Plus the Supreme Court has already dropped two big hints that it’s ready to cut of a major source of funding for public sector unions. Oral arguments cannot always predict the outcome of the case — just ask the millions of Americans who are now insured because of Obamacare — but if they offer any predictive value, a lot of unions are very frightened right now.
The issue at hand in Friedrichs vs California Teachers Association case before SCOTUS is the “agency fees” the public sector unions charge non-union members. These unions are allowed to mingle these dollars with the rest of their funds, which they then go on to use for political purposes.
The plaintiffs argue that the spending of the monies they are forced to pay if they want to work for political purposes they do not approve of violates their 1st Amendment rights.
And they’re right.
Of course, unions are the one form of incorporation that the left approves of. So it will never occur to them that all the unions have to do to get this problem to go away is to stop spending money for political purposes.
They are so used to having to buy their influence, and politicians are so used to having to be bought, that the idea is completely foreign to them.
That would be very interesting to watch. Right now the teacher’s union gets about a thousand bucks a year from me, and they have done little that I agree with politically in a LONG time. Be interesting to see how many people decide to drop the union and pocket the money.
Now, if they could just put medical benefits up to to competition, rather than being run by the union and offering a lot of “required coverage” things. De-unionization in CO has done a lot of good things, as it has in WI. As so many on the left say about gun control, I look forward to having that conversation.