by goobster

I am utterly fascinated by the Supreme Court, the written statements by the members of the court, and how they think about law, the Constitution, the tricameral system, and the country as a whole.

The news media do a great disservice to these nine brilliant people, by dumbing down extremely intelligent thinking into bite-sized pieces for a credulous public.

The linked article is about a case that may destroy unions in America. The decision is coming down soon, and with Gorsuch providing the conservative majority, it looks like unions may be dead.

I know people won't read a long thinky piece about the Supreme Court and First Amendment rights, so I'll just excerpt the important bit - the last three paragraphs - here.

THIS is why the Supreme Court, and the cases they choose, is so fascinating to watch:

"...Moreover, some union advocates have argued that conservatives will rue a ruling overturning Abood for what it might imply about the application of the Constitution to public employment more generally. “Imagine if a teacher called in sick, and an administrator had to procure a warrant before searching her desk drawer for a text book, or else risk violating the Fourth Amendment,” Moshe Marvit, a fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote in the New York Times. “Or imagine if a police sergeant who tells an officer that he didn’t have time to listen to a complaint about the break room now has to worry that he violated the First Amendment.”

Shaun Richman, a veteran union organizer, warned in the Washington Post that a ruling against agency fees could require public employers to allow multiple unions to compete for workers, instead of dealing with just one. That could lead to greater union militancy and power as unions fall over each other to show they’re the most committed worker advocates.

All of which is to say that there is a sound conservative basis, both tactically and legally, for rejecting the Janus challenge and leaving public employee unions be. That doesn’t mean that Gorsuch will, in fact, embrace this logic and rule in favor of the public employee unions. The outcome is still up in the air. But an anti-union ruling isn’t as certain as you might expect from a conservative Court."