Except it didn’t end.
Three years later, it took President Eisenhower’s federalizing of Arkansas National Guardsmen to allow nine black teens admittance to Little Rock High School. Five years after that, James Meredith still needed the High Court’s action (and many thousands of federal troops) to force defiant administrators and politicians to allow him to register at Ole Miss. One year later, Alabama’s intransigent governor stood on the state university’s steps to prevent that school’s integration by two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.
And so it goes with historic SCOTUS rulings — no matter their importance, no matter their clarity, there will be, and are, 21st-century editions of George Wallace and Orval Faubus, insolent and intimidating and intent on obstructing defined constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision — which protects the First Amendment rights of public-sector employees, and which dismantled the labor-law precedent (the 1977 Abood decision) — is very much in this tradition. Justice Samuel Alito clearly ruled that government workers had to give affirmative consent in order for once-obligatory dues and fees to be payroll-deducted into union coffers, and that consent may not be assumed. This ruling may have Big Labor running scared, but it is also widely ignored in practice, the subject of brazen defiance.
Which comes as no surprise to Mark Janus, the case’s principal litigant. Yes, the High Court’s verdict on his behalf — together with the related 2014 Harris v. Quinn ruling — was unambiguous. But it was a forgone conclusion that Big Labor would retaliate by engaging in a modern version of standing on steps and in doorways.
Read the full article on National Review.