UNIONS DEALT A LONG-AWAITED BLOW | The Korematsu Comparison | Is Kennedy Throwing In the Towel?
June 27, 2018
BYE BYE BYE
|After almost two years of build-up, the Supreme Court today struck a major blow to America’s unions that undermines their finance structure and effectively their future. The justices ruled 5-4 that workers who choose not to join a public sector union cannot be charged “fair share” fees or the cost of collective bargaining. The decision reverses a four-decades-old precedent and upends laws in 22 states. JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO wrote the court’s majority opinion noting, “Under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsidize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities. We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”
SMALLER BUT NOT WEAKER
|Noam Scheiber argues in The New York Times that although today’s SCOTUS decision might make public sector unions smaller and poorer, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll get any weaker.
Y'ALL READY FOR THIS
|“California’s public employee unions, for decades some of the state’s towering political giants, knew this day was coming.” That’s John Myers writing in the Los Angeles Times about the preparation that’s been made in Sacramento in anticipation for this morning’s Supreme Court ruling.
IT'S OVER WHEN HE SAYS IT'S OVER
|Bloomberg’s Cass Sunstein points out four things everyone should know about the Supreme Court’s travel ban ruling, kicking off his list with its relationship to the infamous 1944 Korematsu decision. It was in that ruling that the justices upheld a presidential order calling for the forcible relocation of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps — and it’s never been overruled. But CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS wrote a repudiation of the 1944 case in his travel ban opinion saying Korematsu was “gravely wrong the day it was decided” and “has been overruled in the court of history.”
OR IS IT
|But Aziz Huq writes in Vox that the travel ban decision doesn’t have any success in thwarting Korematsu comparisons. If anything, the travel ban and Korematsu are the closest of kin. Huq argues that the logic used in the Supreme Court decision that upheld Trump’s travel ban policy could also justify Japanese internment camps today. Huq argues, “The result of today’s decision is that discrimination on racial and religious grounds is now de facto permissible — so long as it done under the rubric of immigration or national security.”
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|The Editorial Board of The New York Times ain’t got no time for funny business. It gets straight to the point in its response to the SCOTUS travel ban decision, calling the Trump administration’s policy “bigoted and feckless.”
GRABBING THE BENCH
|“Progressives and moderates take note: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vote is no longer in play.” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern argue that JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY can no longer be counted on as a swing vote. They say his Trump-friendly votes on crisis pregnancy centers and the travel ban show he’s no longer interested in “playing the role of the wise centrist.”
IT'S OVER, IT'S OVER, I'M LEAVING, I'M GONE
|Richard L. Hasen posits in Slate that the “depressing defeatism” of JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY’S work this term could be an indication that his time on the high court is quickly coming to a close.
KEEPING THE CON
|President of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Ilyse Hogue says in CNN that the Supreme Court’s decision on crisis pregnancy centers just opened the door for women to be subject to even greater deception about their health care options. She wrote in her piece yesterday: “In every state in America, a network has been quietly building women’s health centers. Many look like Planned Parenthood centers, have exact replicas of waiting and exam rooms and are located within blocks of legitimate reproductive health clinics. The mission of these centers? In their words, ‘capture’ pregnant women before they visit a reproductive health clinic that provides a full range of services, including abortion. Today, the Supreme Court threw the doors wide open for them to continue this practice.”
DON'T TELL ME HOW I FEEL
|But in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Farris argues that no matter what anyone feels about abortion, yesterday’s SCOTUS decision on crisis pregnancy centers and compelled speech should be celebrated. Farris thinks the California law went too far in its directives on the faith-based pregnancy centers to “provide free advertising for abortion clinics.” He asserts, “[California’s] law unconstitutionally targeted these pregnancy centers because of their views opposing abortion. No one should be forced to express a message that violates their convictions, especially on such deeply divisive subjects. The court was right to put a stop to the law.”
VOTING FOR SCOTUS
|Throughout his campaign, DONALD TRUMP used one very important appeal to entice voters to support his name on the ballot: the Supreme Court. Phillip Bump in The Washington Post reports that the strategy worked as exit polling from the 2016 election shows that a majority of those who saw the president’s ability to nominate justices to SCOTUS as the most important factor in their vote to back Trump. Bump writes, “More to the point, though, 26 percent of Trump voters told pollsters that Supreme Court nominees were the most important factor in their voting, compared with only 18 percent of Hillary Clinton voters who said the same.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
The Supreme Court's Green Light To Discriminate
The Atlantic“Roberts’s logic is baffling. The chief justice argues that since it discriminates against some Muslims, rather than against every Muslim, the order is not motivated by hostility against Muslims. But the order was expressly motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice, and so it enshrines in law official disapproval of a particular religion.”
Workers Must Get Radical To Fight Back Against Janus
The New York Times“Workers will have to reconstruct this countervailing power and find new ways to build solidarity. We’re going to have to get bold again. We’ve seen a version of what this could look like in this year’s teachers strikes. As the momentum of those strikes has shown, when workers are boxed into a corner there’s appetite for going outside the normal lines of acceptable action.”
Move Over, Dred Scott
The Washington Post“Mahatma Gandhi is believed to have said that ‘the measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.’ The Trump travel ban targets Muslims, here and abroad, separating their families and denigrating their faith. Yet just as in Dred Scott and Korematsu, the Supreme Court failed the ultimate test of justice. It bowed to the prejudice of the powerful when its duty was to protect the most vulnerable.”
Even The Supreme Court Is Alarmed About Trump
The Washington Post“Even Republican appointees on the Supreme Court — two of them, anyway: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — are evidently appalled by President Trump and his behavior. Small comfort, perhaps, as they joined three other conservative justices to uphold Trump’s travel ban, but still a striking example of where this president has brought us.”
The Supreme Court's Travel Ban Decision Wasn't Just Misguided, It Was Hypocritical
Los Angeles Times“I have rarely seen so much inconsistency and even hypocrisy from the Supreme Court as in its decision to uphold President Trump’s travel ban. A few weeks ago, the court found that members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had expressed impermissible hostility to religion because of relatively mild statements that every business in Colorado should serve all customers regardless of the owner’s religion, and that terrible things have been done in world history in the name of religion. By contrast, the court in upholding the travel ban essentially ignored repeated statements from Trump and his top advisors that he wanted to ban Muslims from coming to the United States.”