Charles Pierce- THE STAKES THIS FALL

By Charles P. Pierce on June 30, 2014

In the other big decision today, Harris v. Quinn, the conservative majority among the Nine Wise Souls once again played their favorite game of coring out a precedent while, simultaneously, chickening out on what they really wanted to do, but can't do, at least until a couple more of their ideological bro's come on board because, otherwise, they might scare Anthony Kennedy into common sense, and none of them wants that. What happened in this case happened to (for the most part) poor women doing one of the most thankless and necessary jobs that there is—home health-care workers. (Ask anyone who is in anyway associated with, say, the extended Alzheimer's community. We'd throw these people a parade every day if we could.) Another delightful 5-4 decision held that unions could not extract fees from all state employees working in specific fields. However, it left weakened, but intact, the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board Of Education, in which the court held that public employees could be compelled to pay for collective bargaining. (The plaintiff in the Harris case was a woman caring for her disabled son at home and she argued that it was unfair for her to have to pay a fee to the SEIU to cover collective bargaining.) Writing for the majority, on the biggest day he's had on the Court since smart people were telling us what a moderate he was, Justice Samuel Alito made it plain that he didn't think much of the Abood decision, but that he didn't have the votes (yet) to blow it up entirely. He referred to it as an "anomaly," and said it was decided "on questionable grounds." He also wrote that:


Such as, one supposes, protecting the process of collective bargaining from the powerful people who want to destroy it. But we digress.

If anyone needed proper motivation to turn out in the fall, and in 2016, here it is. The Court is one thin vote away from turning into the 21st Century memorial to Stephen Johnson Field. Right now, the four conservatives on the Court don't have the votes—and, therefore, the guts—to do everything they want to do because they have to keep poor Kennedy happy. But, even with that, they have gutted the Voting Rights Act, prompting an energetic voter-suppression effort aimed at minority citizens out in the states. (Field, who joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, would have approved.) They have pushed the idea of corporate personhood even beyond what Field dreamed.

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