The Little Retro Battles

Peace settles into Washington. Congress is in recess, the President is taking a Christmas break, and so the partisan bickering has taken a big break. But that’s in Washington. The mini-battles, often fought in local communities and in the courts, address limitations on clinics that offer abortion, school books that don’t feature creationism, and even feature a law suit from two ultra-conservative states (Nebraska and Oklahoma) against Colorado for selling demon weed that winds up in these two rather old-line traditional states – maybe your residents need the MJ to tolerate life in Oklahoma and Nebraska!

But as little local wars are being fought with the flood of Citizens United funding pouring into conservative coffers, there is a movement afoot to create national policy through a litany of state laws and local ordinances meant to undermine federal law. And if enough of these little laws find traction, they could easily pull the rug out of some major long-standing liberal traditions. One of the biggest fights is taking place on the labor front, and the thought of killing what little private sector unionism remains (under 7% of our workforce) is drawing conservative SuperPac money by the railroad-car-load.

But before we delve into this chipping away effort, it is useful to understand how, under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, the federal government has preemptive power in this labor arena, thus trumping local law. One of the hallmarks of federal legislation (the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which was passed by Congress over President Harry Truman’s veto) deals with the right of unions to force non-members – who benefit from the results of collective bargaining – to join and/or pay the union dues (or comparable fees) needed to fund the union activities. The feds give unions that right unless “prohibited by state or territorial law.” Roughly half of the states have passed such a prohibition (see above map) and are generally referred to as “right to work” states, and with increasing GOP control of state legislatures, we can expect more states to follow this trend.

While it would seem that the federal law only allows states to pass such prohibitions, a number of local communities, arguing that the federal doesn’t specifically prevent municipalities from passing similar ordinances, have sucked up that SuperPac money to battle unions on their local turf. Imagine the hodge-podge of diverse municipal positions unions would face within a single state should this practice spread unchecked by a contrary ruling from a very conservative U.S. Supreme Court. Still, SuperPac money is finding its mark. But this process is happening, now a trickle, threatening to become a downpour.

“Conservative groups are opening a new front in their effort to reshape American law, arguing that local governments have the power to write their own rules on a key labor issue that has, up to now, been the prerogative of states.

“Beginning here in the hometown of Senator Rand Paul and the Chevy Corvette, groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation and a newly formed nonprofit called Protect My Check are working together to influence local governments the same way they have influenced state legislatures, and anti-union ordinances are just the first step in the coordinated effort they envision.

“A carefully devised plan began to unfold last week, when the Warren County Fiscal Court met here and preliminarily approved, in a 6 to 1 vote, a ‘right to work’ ordinance that would allow employees represented by a union to opt out of paying union fees. This week two more Kentucky counties, Fulton and Simpson, followed suit, and a dozen more are expected to do the same in the next six weeks.

“Supporters of the effort say that if they are successful in Kentucky, they will try to pass similar local laws in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other places that do not have a statewide right-to-work law. Protect My Check is promising to pay for the legal battles of any local government that tries it.

“‘There are literally thousands of targets for the initiative,’ said Brent Yessin, an anti-union consultant and lawyer who is on the board of advisers for Protect My Check, said at a recent meeting in Washington. ‘Doing this county by county, city by city is more time consuming, but it’s also more time consuming and draining for the unions to fight.’” New York Times, December 18^th.

There seems little doubt that fearing the next census (in 2020) that should establish white rural traditionalist as a distinct minority in this country, they are doing everything possible at every level – often with the help of voter ID laws and gerrymandering – to lay the groundwork for traditionalist preemption of any countervailing future effort by the inevitable “majority of minorities” to instill more open and worker-centric laws. This battle – devoid of the spirit of government-by-compromise – is rapidly eroding the underpinnings of the democratic form of government that once-upon-a-time was how America was run.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are dealing with the notion of terrified and overfunded traditionalists paying and fighting with all their sizeable might to turn the clock backwards and crush the notion of the one thing that they cannot change: change itself.