CalvinBall wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Optimistically, gorsuch is going, but he looks terrible.

Huh?

CalvinBall wrote:i am an idiot. you are correct slugs.

Grotewold wrote:

pacino wrote:perhaps for the ones that are pure politics, but the true believers will see it as a lifelong goal achieved.

I mean for the party as a whole, which to me is ultimately Big Money. They would lose a lot more votes (and power) than they'd gain

Wolfgang622 wrote:I do feel the need to explain, for the uninitiated, exactly how agency fee worked, and how much Donal Trump's tweet revealed the game being played here.

Unions, like corporations, may not use money from the general fund for the endorsement of political candidates. Such money may be used for political education: so, just as soda companies can use their corporate profits to run ads saying things like "the soda tax hurts working families" or whatever, union have an equal right to use dues money to say "a right to work bill hurts working families." Notice that neither statement endorses a specific candidate. Neither dues money nor corporate profits may be used for that purpose.

Public sector unions, until today, had an arrangement that involved a further restriction. Yes, we could collect money from non-members, because non-members undoubtedly benefit from negotiated contracts and because unions must legally represent every person in their group (technical term: bargaining unit), whether that person is a member or not. However, any such money collected may not EVER be used for even political education on an issue that would be of concern to members. Such money can only be used to finance bargaining, grievance filing, and other contract enforcement. Such money must legally be held in escrow every year, and non-members presented with an annual report, which they had a 30 day window to challenge, before said money could be released into the general fund to pay the appropriate bills. Moreover, agency fee was never at any point guaranteed as something every union could collect - 26 of the 50 states before today were already "Right to Work," that is no agency fee allowed - and agency fee in any case had to be negotiated with the employer and then ratified into a contract by a vote of membership. So, there were many non-court based remedies available if you worked in a place that had agency fee and you wanted it gone. And money so collected was not EVER able to be used to fund a candidate ANYWHERE, Republican or Democrat, for anything. To have done so would have been highly illegal, even before today, and I can tell you that every local I work with had spent many hours a year ensuring they complied with all applicable laws surrounding agency fee, and that no such money was ever spent improperly, and for very good reason: if it was, and if a union got caught doing it, people could and would be prosecuted, and rightly so.

The only money that is legal for a corporation or a union to use in direct support of any candidate is money separately donated to the corporation or union and earmarked specifically for that purpose. Such contributions are strictly voluntary and can be made in any amount chosen by the donor. I donate to my union's political funds by my choice, as I am sure many of you do to your employer's political funds. All of that was as true yesterday as it is today. Therefore, no Democrat anywhere ever received money from a union that had originated as agency fee, or even as dues. OK: I am sure somewhere somebody cheated, but then those people often wind up the subject of FBI investigations. Every local I work with did it 100% honestly.

Moreover, union membership or non-membership or anything else having to do with a union in no way prevents an individual from speaking clearly and loudly against his/her union's stated positions, and in fact organizing his/her fellow workers to join them in being against those positions.

So the notion that agency fee deprived anyone of free speech was patently false. A non-member could say anything they liked about anyone they liked, was free to organize fellow members and non-members alike to join them in taking action against their own union if they wished, they could join even and STILL not have any part of their money used to back any particular political candidate (because using dues money to support a particular candidate was illegal before the Janus decision), and by joining they could vote for themselves into office to change what the union was doing or who it supported, or find like-minded members and vote them in. They could appeal to their state legislators to pass Right to Work legislation, which was happening all over the country. Instead, they ran to Mommy and Daddy today and had them come in and take their side. And Mommy and Daddy overruled a 9-0 decision by a 5-4, party-line vote that was the culmination of a six year assault on the law that made a mockery of even the appearance of impartiality by the five conservative justices. They long ago figured out what they wanted to do, then engineered a situation that permitted them to do it.

So Donald Trump's tweet on Janus was ridiculous, but also chillingly truthful. This was never about free speech. It was about the perception that unions only back Democrats, which is both untrue (see NJEA's amazingly stupid flop of a campaign to go with the non-Steve Sweeney candidate), and also kind of unaffected by today's decision anyway, since this decision does not touch COPE money - that is, the money collected on a strictly voluntary basis to back specific candidates.

All it really did was make it harder for unions to exist in the first place, or be effective advocates for the people they represent in their workplaces - which of course is the reason they exist in the first place. It is a rich man's ruling meant to make the rich man richer by making it much, much harder for his workers to meet him on equal footing.

That is its one and ONLY purpose, and it accomplishes it ruthlessly.

Squire wrote:What's the best guess as to how many states would pass laws banning abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned? Don't you think the reaction from corporate America would be similar to the reaction to NC's bathroom bill last year or worse? Or would there be safety in numbers?

slugsrbad wrote:https://www.reproductiverights.org/what-if-roe-fell

Wolfgang622 wrote:I do feel the need to explain, for the uninitiated, exactly how agency fee worked, and how much Donal Trump's tweet revealed the game being played here.

Unions, like corporations, may not use money from the general fund for the endorsement of political candidates. Such money may be used for political education: so, just as soda companies can use their corporate profits to run ads saying things like "the soda tax hurts working families" or whatever, union have an equal right to use dues money to say "a right to work bill hurts working families." Notice that neither statement endorses a specific candidate. Neither dues money nor corporate profits may be used for that purpose.

Public sector unions, until today, had an arrangement that involved a further restriction. Yes, we could collect money from non-members, because non-members undoubtedly benefit from negotiated contracts and because unions must legally represent every person in their group (technical term: bargaining unit), whether that person is a member or not. However, any such money collected may not EVER be used for even political education on an issue that would be of concern to members. Such money can only be used to finance bargaining, grievance filing, and other contract enforcement. Such money must legally be held in escrow every year, and non-members presented with an annual report, which they had a 30 day window to challenge, before said money could be released into the general fund to pay the appropriate bills. Moreover, agency fee was never at any point guaranteed as something every union could collect - 26 of the 50 states before today were already "Right to Work," that is no agency fee allowed - and agency fee in any case had to be negotiated with the employer and then ratified into a contract by a vote of membership. So, there were many non-court based remedies available if you worked in a place that had agency fee and you wanted it gone. And money so collected was not EVER able to be used to fund a candidate ANYWHERE, Republican or Democrat, for anything. To have done so would have been highly illegal, even before today, and I can tell you that every local I work with had spent many hours a year ensuring they complied with all applicable laws surrounding agency fee, and that no such money was ever spent improperly, and for very good reason: if it was, and if a union got caught doing it, people could and would be prosecuted, and rightly so.

The only money that is legal for a corporation or a union to use in direct support of any candidate is money separately donated to the corporation or union and earmarked specifically for that purpose. Such contributions are strictly voluntary and can be made in any amount chosen by the donor. I donate to my union's political funds by my choice, as I am sure many of you do to your employer's political funds. All of that was as true yesterday as it is today. Therefore, no Democrat anywhere ever received money from a union that had originated as agency fee, or even as dues. OK: I am sure somewhere somebody cheated, but then those people often wind up the subject of FBI investigations. Every local I work with did it 100% honestly.

Moreover, union membership or non-membership or anything else having to do with a union in no way prevents an individual from speaking clearly and loudly against his/her union's stated positions, and in fact organizing his/her fellow workers to join them in being against those positions.

So the notion that agency fee deprived anyone of free speech was patently false. A non-member could say anything they liked about anyone they liked, was free to organize fellow members and non-members alike to join them in taking action against their own union if they wished, they could join even and STILL not have any part of their money used to back any particular political candidate (because using dues money to support a particular candidate was illegal before the Janus decision), and by joining they could vote for themselves into office to change what the union was doing or who it supported, or find like-minded members and vote them in. They could appeal to their state legislators to pass Right to Work legislation, which was happening all over the country. Instead, they ran to Mommy and Daddy today and had them come in and take their side. And Mommy and Daddy overruled a 9-0 decision by a 5-4, party-line vote that was the culmination of a six year assault on the law that made a mockery of even the appearance of impartiality by the five conservative justices. They long ago figured out what they wanted to do, then engineered a situation that permitted them to do it.

So Donald Trump's tweet on Janus was ridiculous, but also chillingly truthful. This was never about free speech. It was about the perception that unions only back Democrats, which is both untrue (see NJEA's amazingly stupid flop of a campaign to go with the non-Steve Sweeney candidate), and also kind of unaffected by today's decision anyway, since this decision does not touch COPE money - that is, the money collected on a strictly voluntary basis to back specific candidates.

All it really did was make it harder for unions to exist in the first place, or be effective advocates for the people they represent in their workplaces - which of course is the reason they exist in the first place. It is a rich man's ruling meant to make the rich man richer by making it much, much harder for his workers to meet him on equal footing.

That is its one and ONLY purpose, and it accomplishes it ruthlessly.

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:This really is the darkest timeline.

CalvinBall wrote:With McCain missing Dems could just not show up and they wouldn't be able to vote on anything with only 50 members present