What you need to know about the Janus v. AFSCME case, arguments for which were heard in the Supreme Court on Monday morning, is that it is the result of a very long game. It is one of the key reasons why Sen. Mitch McConnell was willing to invent an entirely new, invisible-ink addition to the Constitution in which a nation's first black president was not allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice, said Constitution be damned, during his last year of office because reasons. It is one of the key reasons archconservative Neil Gorsuch was summarily dispatched to the position once the presidency flipped to Republican ownership. It is one of the key reasons Republican leaders studiously ignored warnings of Russian election tampering, going so far as to demand President Barack Obama withhold a fuller warning to the public. It is one of the key reasons American corporatists have been dumping money into the party, and into legal activism groups in particular.
The Janus case is meant to break the spines of public employee unions by declaring that unions no longer have the right to compel fees from non-union members who benefit from their bargained-for union contracts. That will almost certainly be the court's decision, now that tiebreaker Gorsuch has arrived to finally give corporate America the voice on the court they so desperately needed, having for so long had to make do with the likes of hippies like Roberts and Alito.
While it's proximately about conservatives' deep passionate hatred for labor unions of all sorts, it is more specifically about damaging opponents of Republicanism in America's voting booths. Because labor unions tend to support Democrats, the only answer, for wealthy Americans needing to put the screws to the rest of the population in order to secure another tax break, is to end those unions.
New research by political scientists James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson gives us an idea of what will happen when the Supreme Court imposes so-called right-to-work laws from the bench. Right-to-work laws allow workers to benefit from unions’ collective bargaining without having to pay any union dues at all and are often paired with limits on public-sector organizing. (A recent right-to-work law in Kentucky also banned public sector workers from striking, an infringement on constitutional rights the courts have not seen fit to strike down.) The Janus decision, which would bar mandatory agency fees in all public sector unions, is basically a right-to-work law for public employees in every state.
To study the effect of these laws, Feigenbaum, Hertel-Fernandez, and Williamson examined counties that share a border between two states, one with right-to-work laws and one without. These county pairs share demographic, political, and economic similarities. The authors found that the passage of right-to-work measures decreased Democratic vote share by 2 to 3 percentage points in both presidential and down-ballot elections—enough to have swung Michigan and Wisconsin to Trump in 2016. They also found that these laws reduce turnout and demobilize blue-collar workers, with blue-collar workers less likely to report receiving a contact about voting in right-to-work states.
The movers and shakers behind getting this case to the court are a gallery of wealthy archconservatives, donors who have dedicated themselves to crafting a new conservative judicial doctrine restricting worker rights and elevating corporate rights.
Mr. Uihlein has donated well over $1 million over the years to groups like the Federalist Society that work to orient the judiciary in a more conservative direction. They have helped produce a Supreme Court that most experts expect to rule in Mr. Janus’s favor.
The case illustrates the cohesiveness with which conservative philanthropists have taken on unions in recent decades. “It’s a mistake to look at the Janus case and earlier litigation as isolated episodes,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist who studies conservative groups. “It’s part of a multipronged, multitiered strategy.”
This is all part of the same long game from conservatives. It is difficult to appeal to American voters with an agenda of racism, xenophobia, and (especially) obsequious toadying to the wealthy and the corporate. It is easier, it turns out, to hobble the ability of American voters to vote at all. It was the reason the Voting Rights Act needed to be gutted, to reduce the number of black Americans voting. It was the reason for legalizing massive amounts of corporate and anonymous money, via Citizens United and other conservative-pushed decisions, so that the irritating voice of the American population could be properly countered by their ostentatiously wealthy betters. It was the reason Mitch McConnell declared that the outcome of an election a Republican might win was the new measure of a president's constitutional powers, rather than the outcome of the election that president did win. It is the reason the Republican-led FCC is now rushing to decapitate net neutrality rules while inventing entirely new rules allowing the conservative-allied Sinclair to monopolize more of the national airwaves than the current laws would allow.
Where we go from here is a different question, but it is about to become an even more pressing one. America's labor unions have suffered through violence, have been declared illegal, and have been demonized by Republicans since the beginning of the civil rights era, often from presidential podiums. This new effort is an attempt to deprive them of enough cash to be heard. They are not alone; a grand Republican effort is underway to ensure as few Americans as possible are heard from, either inside the voting booth or out of it. But these things are cyclical, or at least have been so far, and it is not a given that Americans will meekly put up with it.