While it may not be immediately apparent, Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s presidential election has deep implications for the balance of political power in California. Because of his win, there could soon be a fifth vote on the U. S. Supreme Court – again – to conclude that teachers at California public schools can’t be compelled to pay union dues to the California Teachers Association in support of political activities with which they disagree.

These dues have made the CTA arguably the most powerful force in state politics, able to win passage of bills increasing taxpayer funding for the state teachers’ pension system, protecting teachers’ jobs and making it difficult for their performance to be evaluated. A Fair Political Practices Commission report found that the CTA and affiliated entities spent $212 million to influence state politics from 2000-2009. Dues vary but are generally around $1,000 a year for the CTA’s 325,000 members.

At a January hearing in the Friedrichs v. CTA case, five justices – conservatives Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and libertarian swing voter Anthony Kennedy – appeared poised to allow teachers to opt out of CTA dues.

But in February, Scalia died. In March, the court deadlocked 4-4 on the case, and in June, it declined to hear the case again in the term that began in October.

Trump has promised to appoint a justice with Scalia-like views as his replacement. That presumably would mean five votes to put limits on what public employee union dues could be used for.

Are dues solely used for collective bargaining or not?

The case was brought in 2013 by the libertarian-leaning Center for Individual Rights on behalf of Rebecca Friedrichs, an Orange County schoolteacher (pictured above), and other teachers who object to the CTA’s agenda and reject the claim that their dues were being used for “collective bargaining” purposes only.

The center is expected to start the ball rolling again for a new federal trial, and eventual Supreme Court review, in coming months. It’s not clear whether Friedrichs will again be the plaintiff, but there’s a broad assumption that the CTA — labelled “the worst union in America” by conservative publication City Journal — will again be the target.

As California Lawyer magazine detailed last year, conservative federal judges — not just those on the Supreme Court — seem eager to expedite the challenge to union members’ objections to political uses of their dues. Both trial court and appellate judges went along with plaintiffs’ request that the Friedrichs case be rejected based on precedent — specifically, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, a 1977 Supreme Court ruling upholding compulsory union dues. This request was made to get the case before the high court as soon as possible.

There is little doubt that several justices are eager to scrap the precedent.

At the January hearing on the Friedrichs case, Kennedy ridiculed the argument that compelling teachers to pay union dues that were used to advocate political views they didn’t share was no big deal because those teachers could advocate for their views in other ways.

The contention that upholding Friedrichs’ challenge would destroy public employee unions also was subject to sharp challenge by justices who noted that federal employees’ unions didn’t charge “agency fees” but were able to effectively bargain on pay and benefits.

The four justices who voted to reject the Friedrichs case and side with the CTA criticized what they saw as an unseemly eagerness to reject long-held precedent. They noted that the Abood case’s finding had been challenged repeatedly over the last four decades and had only faced high court doubts in recent years.

…. use the case, Harris v. Quinn, to strike down laws in 26 states requiring teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public-sector employees to pay dues to the unions that negotiate contracts on their behalf, even if the workers don’t want to become union members. …

How bad could the Supreme Court decision be for unions? Consider that in the two years after [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker ended compulsory union membership in his state, the American Federation of Teachers lost 65 percent of its statewide members and the National Education Association shrank by 19 percent. Other public-sector unions also took big hits, with revenue plunging by 40 percent or more.

Instead, the ruling was limited in scope, per AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court dealt a blow to public sector unions Monday, ruling that thousands of home health care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay fees that help cover the union’s costs of collective bargaining.

In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, the justices said the practice violates the First Amendment rights of nonmembers who disagree with the positions that unions take.

But if this wasn’t the bombshell that some expected, it still could have major impact in California, where 400,000 state-paid in-home care workers are represented by the SEIU. This month, they’ve been celebrating a huge victory. The state budget for the fiscal year starting Tuesday for the first time allows them to receive overtime.

But we can expect efforts prompted by today’s Supreme Court ruling to get these workers to opt in to union coverage. These efforts could well succeed. As the Wisconsin numbers cited by Politico show, a lot of union-represented workers don’t much like unions.

June 26, 2013

By Chris Reed

The howls from California Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were instantaneous over the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the special powers over local and state elections given to the Justice Department need to reflect modern realities, not what life was like in 1965, when Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was first adopted.

The decision seems completely reasonable. We’re coming off a national election in which the African-American turnout rate was higher than the white turnout rate. African-American elected officials are ubiquitous in the South, so why should Voting Rights Act-secured special Justice Department scrutiny be presumed as necessary basically for just one region in 2013? As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.”

But what is striking about all the cacophony from the left, and the media, over an eminently defensible ruling is that no one seems to acknowledge where the worst segregation is these days — that is, where generally wealthier whites with more flexibility on where to live go out of their way to not live with generally poorer minorities. By and large, it’s in liberal cities — including the president’s adopted hometown.

This is from a 2011 Huffington Post story on a study based on 2010 census data by Brown University professor John Logan and Florida State University professor Brian Stults. The most segregated cities in America, from 10 to 1:

10. Nassau-Suffolk, Long Island, New York

9. St. Louis, Missouri

8. Cleveland

7. Miami

6. Philadelphia

5. Chicago

4. Newark

3. New York City

2. Milwaukee

1. Detroit

I think this is awfully telling. To hear Pelosi tell it, bigotry is a Southern phenomenon. But this makes it look like the Northeast has a significant problem, too. As Paul Harvey would say, it’s the rest of the story — and it paints a much different picture than the one you get from the ardent defenders of a never-changing, trapped-in-amber Voting Rights Act. That picture is one of liberal hypocrisy on race.

By Chris Reed

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Fisher v. the University of Texas, the latest big affirmative-action case to reach SCOTUS. Conservative justices used their questions to establish how intentionally slippery and vague UT officials are in explaining how race is included as a factor in deciding admissions to their first-rate public university. Here’s a mainstream media account that doesn’t capture the verve with which John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy went after the University of Texas’ lawyer.

To students of California politics and academia, what should be especially interesting is how the justices deal with the claim that fuzzy, “holistic” judgments that lead to less-qualified minority students being admitted over much more-qualified white or Asian students are somehow less objectionable than hard quotas. In California, this “holistic” approach to college admissions was long ago revealed as an explicit attempt to game Proposition 209, the 1996 state law which bans racial quotas in state government.

The N.Y. Times figures out the UC ploy

And which journalistic outlet made this point best? The New York Times! Economics columnist David Leonhardt wrote a long piece in the Sunday magazine on Sept. 30, 2007, explaining how the UC system, especially UCLA, used fuzzy talk to advance a clearly racial agenda — one with far more benefits for the kids of affluent blacks and Hispanics than poor Asians (or poor whites).

Here was my take then:

“One of the aspects of the University of California system/affirmative action debate that consistently gets short shrift in media coverage is that in the old quota system, African-American and Latino students with less impressive scholastic records weren’t bumping white students, they were bumping Asian-American students. So Asian-Americans paid the biggest price for a policy that has as its central rationale the need to remedy the dominant white culture’s historic discrimination against minorities. Huh?

“So when I saw the long New York Times magazine article … I wasn’t sure what to expect. Here’s what I got: a 4,800-word article explaining and implicitly praising the possibly illegal ways that UC officials got around Proposition 209 and its ban on racial considerations in admission.

“I understand why some people might think this is a good thing. But I cannot understand why Leonhardt would mention the following pretty much in passing:

“Even as the number of low-income black freshmen [at UCLA] soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students — not a decline in well-off students. So under the old quota system, Asian-American students in general paid the price for society’s attempts to atone for white racism. Now under the new surreptitious affirmative-action program, poor Asian-American students are paying the highest price. If this is social justice, count me out.”

The Connerly perspective

Here is part of Ward Connerly’s take on Leonhardt’s telling essay on race and UC:

“‘The most useful lesson to be learned from Leonhardt’s article is that it would be prudent for those on both sides of the race preferences in college admissions debate to work toward some acceptable compromise for the good of our nation. …  We must also understand the national imperative of providing access to low income students and to those who are confronted with disadvantages that impede their ability to lead productive lives and to demonstrate their potential value to American society. It is not in our national interest to have hordes of people standing on the sidelines seething with anger because they cannot obtain a ticket to gain access to a better life in America. That ticket for most of us is higher education. Thus, those of us who believe in academic meritocracy must broaden how we view ‘merit.’ That largely means empowering admissions officers to search for talent from among all students and not just the “A” average, high SAT students. In short, socioeconomic ‘affirmative action,’ in a colorblind admissions process, can be that compromise.”

One factor or the factor?

This crucial detail in how affirmative action, disguised or otherwise, works was a focus of Justice Alito in Wednesday’s questioning:

“JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  The top 10 percent plan admits lots of  African Americans — lots of Hispanics and a fair number of African Americans. But you say, well, it’s — it’s faulty, because it doesn’t admit enough African Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of  the child of successful professionals in Dallas.  Now, that’s your argument? If you have -­you have an applicant whose parents are — let’s say they’re — one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part — is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?”

Like Jews and the Ivy League in the 1930s

Alito tied the University of Texas’ attorney in knots. I suspect the U.S. Supreme Court will end up limiting or killing affirmative action on a 5-3 vote next June (Elena Kagan recused herself). If that is what happens, California’s long, miserable record on affirmative action will have helped drive its demise.

This record goes back well before Prop. 209. By a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that innocent Asian-Americans were the victims of affirmative action in UC admissions, not historically oppressive whites. This is from a September 1987 Los Angeles Times story:

“There may be a parallel between what is happening to Asian-Americans now and what happened to Jews in the 1920s and 1930s at some Ivy League schools. … And, like Jews before them, the members of the new model minority contend that they have begun to bump up against artificial barriers to their advancement.

“Casual inspection of the Berkeley campus … makes any suggestion of anti-Asian bias seem implausible. Asians represent 6.7% of California’s population, but they account for 25.5% of the Berkeley student body. …

“But … the percentage of Asians in the student body might be even higher, the critics contend, if admissions were still based strictly on merit. Since the mid-1970s, both Americans of Asian descent and immigrants from Asia have so outperformed Caucasian, black and Latino students in high schools that universities have manipulated admissions criteria to hold back the Asian influx, say the critics.

“‘As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,’ said Ling-Chi Wang, a peppery Chinese-born professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley and one of the university’s severest critics. ‘Since then, Asian-American admissions rates have either stabilized or declined … university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem.'”

Affirmative action is a much easier sell when it is built on abstract talk about the historical effects of white racism. But when its reality is punishing another ethnic group in the name of atoning for white racism, it looks shabby — or, to use Chief Justice Roberts’ term, “sordid.”

This ugliness first became clear in California a generation ago.

By Steven Greenhut

From Watchdog.org

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday upholding the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s sweeping health-care law was, of course, shocking given that everyone — including, reportedly, the president and his administration — expected the high court to toss the individual mandate portion of the law. I could almost hear the screams of angst in newsrooms, where reporters have no doubt pre-written much of their work on the demise of ObamaCare.

There are two significant portions of the decision. The first upholds the government’s decision to force the public to buy health insurance, a chilling expansion of government power even in a nation where government’s reach has expanded into nearly every part of our lives.

The second significant part voids as unconstitutional the law’s granting to the federal government the authority to withhold funds from those states that refuse to approve the expansion of Medicaid.

Much of the commentary will now focus on the politics of the decision. Democratic National Committee staffers are busy gloating via Twitter, and Democratic partisans see this as a vindication for the president’s signature health-care law. They see it as a victory that the beleaguered president can take into the campaign season. Republicans — despite their nomination of a man whose Massachusetts health-care law is seen by many as the precursor to ObamaCare — are attacking the decision and promising to bring up a repeal vote in the House of Representatives.

The good news: The public will at least have something approximating a substantive debate for the fall election about the role of the federal government in something that affects our everyday lives. Mitt Romney has been dancing around the issue, still backing the reform he signed asMassachusetts governor while attacking the president’s national health-care law. He’s going to need a clear and believable story line. American voters might not pay careful attention to the nuances of policy debate, but they rarely embrace candidates who waffle, dodge and weave.

My sense is the decision will bolster Republicans, who have more evidence to back their admittedly overstated claim that this is the nation’s most important election ever. I’ve been hearing that claim since I started following politics in the mid-1970s. Still, this is indeed an important election given how much farther this president has taken the country toward domestic socialism. As much as I dislike the court’s decision, this does throw the main problem back where it belongs – on Congress, which passed this travesty in the first place and can now undo the damage.

Clarity

We will no doubt see election-related clarity. This is the statement from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus:

“Today’s Supreme Court decision sets the stakes for the November election. Now, the only way to save the country from ObamaCare’s budget-busting government takeover of health care is to elect a new president. Under President Obama’s signature legislation, health care costs continue to skyrocket, and up to 20 million Americans could lose their employer-based coverage. A panel of unelected bureaucrats now has the unprecedented authority to come between elderly patients and their doctors. Meanwhile, the rules and regulations placed on job creators and small businesses make it nearly impossible to hire new workers at a time when Americans desperately need jobs.”

That’s a significant statement; the gauntlet is thrown down for the election.

While the Medicaid portion is sensible under any rational understanding of the nation’s system of states’ rights, the upholding of the individual mandate is appalling. Chief Justice John Roberts’ argument is an open door to governmental intrusion in any way and any area of life — provided it is gussied up as a tax. It’s the equivalent of what liberal justices have done over the years in contorting the constitution to justify whatever expansion of power they prefer.

Roberts started out by making the right argument: “Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Con­gress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast do­main to congressional authority. Every day individuals do not do an infinite number of things. In some cases they decide not to do something; in others they simply fail to do it. Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual could potentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and—under the Government’s theory—empower Congress to make those decisions for him.”

It’s a tax

But while the majority could not uphold the individual mandate under the provisions of the Commerce Clause, it did uphold the requirement as the equivalent of a tax. According to the court, “Under the mandate, if an individual does not maintain health insurance, the only consequence is that he must make an additional payment to the IRS when he pays his taxes.”

All any wannabe authoritarian need do in constructing any new law is provide an alternative. You must submit to governmental edicts forcing you to act in an affirmative way or else the IRS will impose, say, a 99 percent tax on your income. I suppose most people will obey. This is even more bizarre because the law does not describe this payment as a tax, and the court even notes that it describes it instead as a “penalty.”

Here’s a perfect example of liberal activism (forget the words, look for the penumbras) and the decision was authored by John Roberts, one of the Republican-appointed justices championed by conservatives.

Libertarians have always argued that conservatives are unreliable because they have no actual opposition to big government. Conservatives are supportive of the national security state, of an enormous military complex, of most federal programs and powers. Romney has defended federal government “entitlements” from efforts to reform them. Republicans and conservatives in particular argue for a smaller government than Democrats argue for, which isn’t hard to do given that Democrats are the party of government. In every domestic area (and many overseas areas as well), the Democratic Party is a permanent lobby for bigger government and higher taxes.

Because Republicans have no principled opposition to big government, we end up with justices such as Roberts, who think a massive governmental intrusion into our lives, including provisions that affirmatively force us to do things (buy insurance), are fine as long as they are cast as a tax.

And now Republicans have nominated a candidate for president whose signature achievement as governor is a health-care bill that isn’t all that different from the one championed by the president. Romney has many positives, but this ruling hits him at his weak spot.

I still think the GOP gains from this as it has a solid narrative to take toward November. But it does get tiring expecting that the mantle of limited government is dependent on the likes of Justice Roberts and politicians such as the government-expanding Republican president who appointed him to the court.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity; write to him at steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

By John Seiler

This just in: The Supreme Soviet just upheld the Obamacare socialized medicine scheme. The controversial “mandate” will just be relabeled a “tax.” The majority opinion was written by “conservative” Chief Justice John Roberts.

So all of you who supported President Bush because he would appoint “strict constructionist” justices to the Supreme Soviet were tricked again. It wouldn’t have been any different had Al Gore or John Kerry appointed the “justices.”

And once again Brutus, the Anti-Federalist who favored keeping the good old Articles of Confederation instead of the centralizing Constitution, was proved right. He warned on March 20, 1788:

“I said in my last number, that the supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no controul. The business of this paper will be to illustrate this, and to shew the danger that will result from it. I question whether the world ever saw, in any period of it, a court of justice invested with such immense powers, and yet placed in a situation so little responsible. Certain it is, that in England, and in the several states, where we have been taught to believe, the courts of law are put upon the most prudent establishment, they are on a very different footing.”

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