From The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-class-war-at-the-supreme-court/2012/06/26/gJQAuffO5V_story.html
Harold Meyerson
June 26, 2012
June 26, 2012
On
the eve of the Supreme Court’s much anticipated ruling on Obamacare,
here is a simple test for detecting the politics behind a decision: When
reading the rulings, look for the double standards and answers to
questions not posed by the cases themselves. By those measures, the
Supreme Court’s record in the past week fairly reeks of the justices’
politics.
Exhibit A is Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000,
in which nonunion California state employees whose wages and benefits
were nonetheless set through the collective bargaining process of SEIU —
the state’s largest union — sued the local to get back a special dues
assessment it levied in 2005 to fight two ballot measures. The union’s
normal practice was to allow nonmembers to opt out of paying the roughly
44 percent of dues that went to matters not directly related to
collective bargaining, such as election campaigns. In this instance,
however, no such opt-out was allowed.
The issue before the court
was whether mandating the collection of the special assessment from
nonmembers violated their constitutional rights to free speech. Alito
and the four other conservative justices ruled that it did, and liberal
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed in a concurring
opinion. But Alito’s opinion
didn’t stop there. It also changed the long-standing practice of
allowing nonmembers to opt out of paying dues toward union functions
outside collective bargaining, mandating instead that the unions “may
not exact any funds from nonmembers without their affirmative consent.”
In other words, unions would have to ask for nonmembers’ permission to
collect political assessments and, possibly, any dues at all.
“Individuals should not be compelled to subsidize private groups or
private speech,” Alito wrote.
Alito’s ruling struck at the heart
of American unionism. By laying the groundwork for creating a right for
nonmembers to avoid dues payments, he came close to nationalizing the
right-to-work laws that 23 states have adopted (though 27 have not). As
Sotomayor noted in a somewhat astonished dissent (Ginsburg and Justices
Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan dissented on this point as well), this
wasn’t the question before the court. Neither side had argued that issue
in their briefs or oral presentations. “The majority announces its
novel rule,” Sotomayor wrote, “without any analysis of potential
countervailing arguments.” And it did so in defiance of the court’s own
Rule 14, which states that “only the questions set out in the petition
or fairly included therein will be considered by the Court.”
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