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.

As the court hears oral arguments, the challenge has made “unions which represent government workers deeply fearful for their financial future and their public stature,” SCOTUSblog noted. “A significant blow to their treasuries could come if non-union workers are able to turn broad hints by the Supreme Court into final victory in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.”

In the case, California teacher Rebecca Friedrichs sued the California Teachers Association over fees she must pay even though she is not a member of the union. “Teachers who, like Friedrichs, have opted out of the union are still represented by it in various contract negotiations, which is why they are required to pay a fee,” the Atlantic noted. “In California, members pay annual dues that average about $1,000 a year, while non-members pay about $600 to $650 for the agency fee alone.”

A landmark challenge

At stake is whether unions are constitutionally permitted to extract dues spent on speech opposed by dues-paying members like the plaintiffs in Friedrichs. “Here is their logic: because unions cannot charge non-members for political activity and since non-members argue that everything a public-sector union does — even bargaining — is political in nature, it follows that any fees violate their First Amendment right not to pay for activity to which they object,” according to the website.

If the court rules in their favor, they will have overturned a 1977 decision allowing the collection of what were deemed “fair share” fees. “Twenty-three states authorize collecting these fees from those who don’t join the union but benefit from a contract that covers them,” NPR reported. Currently 9 percent of teachers have not joined the CTA, the station added. According to state law, however, “any union contract must cover them too, and so they are required to pay an amount that covers the costs of negotiating the contract and administering it. The idea is that they reap the bread-and-butter benefits covered by the contract — wages, leave policies, grievance procedures, etc. — so they should bear some of the cost of negotiating that contract. They do not, however, have to pay for the union’s lobbying or political activities; they can opt out of that by signing a one-page form.”

Political posturing

In one of the arcane twists now familiar to watchers of the court, where sharply divided justices sometimes rule in atypical ways for idiosyncratic reasons, union hopes have been pegged on Justice Antonin Scalia, the resident conservative firebrand. Justice Samuel Alito, whose legal reasoning conservatives often find more reliably conventional, has been viewed as the linchpin of a ruling against the CTA. “A majority opinion by Alito in 2012 suggested the fees were constitutionally vulnerable, and another decision in 2014 stopped just short of overturning the 1977 decision — a ruling that rests on ‘questionable foundations,’ Alito said for a 5-4 majority,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps predictably, unions and their liberal or progressive supporters have cast the case as the latest and most audacious effort by a wide-ranging alliance of monied interests, spearheaded by the Center for Individual Rights, to break the back of organized labor. For decades, conservatives and libertarians have arrayed themselves broadly against labor unions, which have grown more narrowly partisan in their support of Democrats and the open-ended expansion of public benefits for members and themselves. “Still, unlike the Koch political network and its plans to shape the presidential campaign, it is difficult to find evidence of a single coordinating body that has directed money toward the Center for Individual Rights and its legal campaign to allow public employees to opt out of union fees,” the New York Times observed.

“[Justices will] hear arguments over whether the union can require payment from teachers it represents in contract talks. The justices could support the status quo or issue a ruling that only changes payments to CTA. Union leaders everywhere fear, however, a broader decision that would squeeze their own treasuries and diminish public labor’s political clout at all levels of government.”

By Joseph Perkins

California public employee unions were already having a bad June, what with passage of public pension-reform ballot measures by voters in both San Diego and San Jose over the opposition of union bosses.

But their June got exponentially worse yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the political use of nonmember dues without consent — a standard practice by the Service Employees International Union here in the Golden State — violates the First Amendment rights of politically dissenting nonmembers.

The case, Knox v. SEIU, stems from a 2005 campaign by the SEIU against two ballot measures sponsored by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not only did the public employee union use a portion of regular dues for the campaign, it assessed an additional fee for its political activity.

The SEIU was sued by politically dissenting workers in its ranks. Its defense, upheld by a three-judge panel of the liberal U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, was that it offered the dissenters refunds (after the ballot measures were decided, of course).

But by a 7-2 majority, the High Court ruled that after-the-fact refunds do not “undo the violation of First Amendment rights.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito declared that the “aggressive use of power by the SEIU to collect fees from nonmembers is indefensible.” If public employee unions want to use nonmember dues for purposes other than collective bargaining, wrote Alito, they must first obtain the “affirmative consent” of nonmembers.

The state’s public unions are predictably spinning yesterday’s Supreme Court decision as no big deal. “The implications here are very limited,” Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation, told the Los Angeles Times.

Smith’s remark is no less absurd than the recent post-election denials by union bosses in San Jose and San Diego that voter approval of pension-reform ballot measures in the state’s second- and third-largest cities were a rebuke to public employee unions.

November election

Indeed, the prima facie evidence that the High Court’s ruling has more far reaching implications than CLF and other unions let on is the massive campaign the public employees unions are mounting to defeat the “Stop Special Interest Money Now Act,” which will appear on the state ballot in November.

If approved by voters, the measure will restrict unions from using compulsory dues paid by rank-and-file workers for political purposes without prior consent — the requirement established by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling.

Yet, the SEIU issued a press release this past spring in which it declared that passage of the ballot measure will deal a devastating blow to the state’s public employee unions.

“Without a progressive voice,” the SEIU warned, “our jobs and the services we provide Californiaare at risk. Our pay, our benefits, our retirement security are all vulnerable, while Wall Street and the wealthy continue to spend record amounts of money to support their political agenda.”

Well, neither the U.S. Supreme Court, nor the sponsors of the “Stop Special Interest Money Now Act” are seeking to silence the “progressive” voice of the SEIU or any other ofCalifornia’s public employee unions.

They simply are standing up for the principle enunciated by Thomas Jefferson, with which most Californians almost certainly agree: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”