Today on The BradCast, new polls reveal Bernie Sanders far outpacing Hillary Clinton in head-to-head match-ups against all potential Republican challengers and public sector unions take a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court.
First up today, new pre-election polls from NBC/WSJ and PPP in both Iowa and New Hampshire echo recent national polling suggesting that, contrary to so-called “conventional wisdom”, Sanders is more electable against the leading Republican opponents than Clinton is.
Then, constitutional law expert Ian Millhiser joins us to report on today’s “brutal” oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case which threatens to gut public sector union funding.
Millhiser, author of the new book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted
“As a general rule,” Millhiser wrote after today’s oral argument, “the First Amendment does not permit the government to compel someone to say something they disagree with, and the plaintiffs claim that requiring non-union members to subsidize collective bargaining by a union that they may not agree with essentially rises to the level of compelled speech.”
He tells me today that striking down the right to charge these agency fees “creates what’s called a ‘free rider’ problem. If I get something, whether I pay for it or not, a lot of people are going to say ‘Well, why would I pay for this when I get it for free?'” That, in turn, threatens the viability of such unions entirely.
Millhiser goes on to say: “It was pretty clear today that there were five votes that are ready to strike down these agency fee agreements — and that’s going to be not great for the future of many public sector unions.”
We also discuss how an adverse decision for the public unions here may also potentially be used by the Right to go after private unions as well. “What we’ve seen from conservative movement attorneys over the last seven or eight years is an extraordinary entrepreneurship. They’ve been really, really clever in coming up with creative news ways to try to convince courts to implement their policy preferences,” he says.
Citing both that point and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s new call for nine, incredibly radical (and regressive) amendments to the U.S. Constitution (which Millhiser describes as the new Republican governor’s “plan to repeal the 20th century”), I ask why it is that Democrats and progressives don’t show similar “entrepreneurship” in pushing forward their own agenda.
In response, Millhiser defends Dems and progressives by noting a peculiarity about this particular moment in history: “I think conservatives right now increasingly believe that the last 80 years of American history are illegitimate. They believe that our society has started to go off the rails and we have to fundamentally rethink what our government does. Democrats are now in the unfamiliar position of being the nation’s conservative party. I don’t mean in the sense that they are now to the right of the Republicans. I mean ‘conservative’ in the sense that Democrats are conservative in the sense that it wants to preserve the gains that we already have.”
The result is that Dems are put on the defensive, instead of pushing new, progressive programs forward, as I argue in return, leaving voters less than clear about what it is Democrats hope to do when and if they are elected to office.
Finally, we offer a short goodbye to David Bowie and receive late breaking word from the the U.S. Supreme Court concerning imprisoned former Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL)’s final appeal for a new trial…Neither of those news items are encouraging either, unfortunately.
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_IanMilhiserSCOTUSUnions_BernieElectability_011116.mp3]
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Straight up, isn’t EVERYONE – you, me, all of us – getting sick and sooooooooo fucking tired of this constant deluge of really disturbing developments called “Our Nation in the 21st Century??”…
WHAT THE MOTHERFUCKING FUCK IS GOING ON??!….union busting by Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts, the 4 horses’ asses of the Apocalypse?….seriously?….crush the working class, just like that, at the stroke of a pen?….OK, fat cats, you want revolution, you GOT revolution, you avaricious BASTARDS….class warfare cuts both ways and you thugs have been doing ALL the gutting since Reaganomics came trickling down the slaughterhouse sluices….YOUR turn now, pricks…
I had to endure this New Millennium under 8 years of the worst goddamn president in American history, an illiterate belligerent frathouse drunk whose parting gift leaving office was the utter demolition of the world’s – WORLD’S!! – economy, so his cocaine cronies could loot the Treasury in a dust cloud of chaos….
THEN i had to endure this ongoing clusterfuck of Republican histrionics and blatant sabotage since Obama took office, which he foolishly hoped would quiet down if he just played dead most of the time….mary mother of god, Emboldening Bullies 101, read the fucking book!!….they kicked you so hard, Barack, i felt it every day on my own tender ass and still have the welts….
So now?….Hillary??….and four or eight MORE years of this exact same bullshit in Washington???!
NO FUCKING WAY!!!!!!!!!
I ain’t waiting til i’m a hundred, i want justice and equality in America right NOW, THIS NEW YEAR 2016, THIS ELECTION….and our champion is right here before our very eyes, if we will just open our eyes and see….Bernie Sanders can win Iowa….Bernie Sanders can win NH….Bernie Sanders can win it ALL, but it will take all of our help to do it….President Sanders!
No more deals with the Devil…
No more lesser of two evils…
No more holding my nose, or your nose, or my dick…
President Sanders!
Happy New Year, indeed, one and all…
The only way this country is going to change is if the dammed democrats get off their lazy butts and get out to vote. It has to be every election. One of these days they are going to wake up ask what happened when the right to vote is taken away from them. It’s such a shame that so few people get out to vote. Everything is about Me’ Me’ Me’ but someday you are going to say maybe I should have been more aware of what is going on.
Absolutely!….haven’t skipped voting since i was eighteen….no excuse, none….but it also doesn’t help that Bill&Hill&Rahm&Debbie keep riding that DLC wooden horse to every rodeo, and then wonder why enthusiasm falters….right here and now we have a Democratic candidate setting the world on fire with messaging, fundraising AND followers….is the DNC overjoyed?….of course they are, if by “overjoyed” you mean “hates his fucking guts and wishes he were dead”….they’d much rather lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, just to show the rest of us who’s boss….and who’s bought….and whose butt they’re sniffin….
The Democratic Party is not dead but they’re trying REALLY hard, you gotta hand it to ’em!….we, however, cannot and must not hand it to ’em….we will hand it to Bernie Sanders, and you will witness an election year like nothing we’ve ever seen before in any of our lifetimes…
This article from something called the “Montgomery Advertiser” has me confused. This paragraph seems to contradict itself. It’s not even clear who made the first quote.
Whatever. 🙁 This should be an astonishing injustice to anyone except the criminals who put Governor Siegelman in prison. It’s also a travesty that Americans never got the story of how Siegelman’s election was stolen. Maybe that’s why they don’t want him free, until after the 2016 election.