In an email this morning, Bill H asked me whether I know much about a case called Harris v. Quinn, in which the Supreme Court will announce the likely 5-4 majority’s ruling tomorrow. I responded:
I know LOADS about it, Bill, and wrote about it–and about a bizarre comment by Alito during the argument on the case–right after the argument back in Jan. and have mentioned it two or three times since then. It is really striking that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in order to consider the claim: that requiring public employees to pay a fee (not the full union dues, but instead some small percentage of the membership dues as compensation for the union’s legal obligations by which employees who opt out of membership nonetheless gain the benefits of the union contract (pay, benefits, job protections), violates the employee’s First Amendment speech rights.
But what’s downright stunning is that at the argument, Alito said he believed that the very existence of public-employee unions violates the First Amendment because–seriously; he said this–the non-member union-contract beneficiary might want small government. This, from someone whose first official act as a justice was to join Kennedy (the opinion’s author), Scalia, Thomas and Roberts in ruling that a district attorney did not violate an assistant district attorney’s First Amendment speech rights by retaliating against him for writing an internal memo saying that he believed that a cop had falsified some evidence in obtaining a search warrant. That opinion, in a case called Garcetti v. Ceballos, was and remains extremely controversial–it was shocking, really–and played a key role in a case, called Lane v. Franks, that the Court decided two weeks ago.
I suggested in my posts about Harris and about that comment by Alito’s during the argument that the non-union beneficiary of a public-employee union contract had the option of quitting his job or refusing the negotiated benefits in order to reduce the size of government.
I had predicted from the outset that the opinion in Harris would be issued on the same as the opinion in Hobby Lobby, so that news coverage of Hobby Lobby would overwhelm coverage of Harris, and I was right. Because of the way in which the Court divvies up majority-opinion-writing among the justices, it is clear that Alito was assigned to write the opinion in Harris.
There is a (very) outside chance that one justice changed his mind since the week of the argument (when the vote was taken and the majority-opinion-writing was assigned), and that someone other than Alito therefore is writing a 5-4 opinion rejecting the outrageous First Amendment claim. Something sort of like that happened in a case called Bond v. US, argued last Oct. and decided [on Jun. 2], a case that they planned to use to advance their states’-rights juggernaut but instead ended up making an important statement about abuse of prosecutorial discretion–a ground on which they never, ever, would have even considered agreeing to hear the case (okay, maybe they would have, but only because the prosecutor was a federal one, not a state one; but even so, probably not). In that case the actual outcome didn’t change, nor did the author of the opinion (Roberts), but the basis for the ruling, and the statement of law, changed significantly. (I call Bond the Stirred, Not Shaken opinion.) I have a theory about the reason for Roberts’ late change of heart, and I’ve been intending to post in-depth about it but haven’t yet.
I do expect an outrageous 5-4 opinion by Alito in Harris, though.
Yes, the undermining of public-employee unions–like state-courts’ rights to baldly violate individuals’ non-gun-ownership, non-religious, non-real-estate-regulation-er-takings constitutional rights, and to supersede Congress’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment powers to buttress, say, individuals’ voting rights–is definitely on the List Of Circa 1983 Movement Conservative legislation-via-Supreme-Court-pronouncement of THINGS TO GET DONE.
And done, these things will get. Now that the chief justice has expressly conceded that their end game has been all along a Court-mandated plutocracy in which legislators’ constituents are those who pay to become one, irrespective of any connection between the location of the constituent/benefactor’s voting residence and the legislator/beneficiary’s legislative district–now that they have used the First Amendment speech clause to formally institute a poll tax, and redefined the term “constituent,” and therefore “democracy,” beyond former recognition–it’s time for them to get back to other uses of the newly reconstructed First Amendment speech clause. In the name of the Framers.
The original ones, of course!