At Supreme Court, Weaponizing the First Amendment

      No aspect of American exceptionalism deserves patriotic celebration more than our beloved First Amendment with its open-ended promise of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of religion. Our birthright as Americans includes the freedom to say what we what, think what we want, and believe what we want without needing permission from the government.
      In the 90 years since the Supreme Court first incorporated the First Amendment against state and local governments, the Court has enforced its provisions in the service of free expression from sea to shining sea. But the Supreme Court ended its 2017 term with a pair of decisions that allowed groups with no real interest in free speech to turn the First Amendment into a weapon against democratically enacted policies protecting union rights in one instance and reproductive rights in the other.
      The Court not only entertained but validated phony "compelled speech" claims in the two decisions: Janus v. AFSCME and NIFLA v. Becerra.. In Janus, an Illinois government employee, Mark Janus, wanted to get out of paying a fair share of AFSCME's costs in representing him and other non-union members in collective bargaining and grievance procedures, as allowed under Illinois law. In NIFLA, the national trade association representing anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers wanted to get  two centers in San Diego County out from under a California law that required them to give pregnant women accurate information about the availability of the full range of pregnancy-related counseling and services from state agencies.
      Compelled speech claims have an honored history at the Supreme Court. Marie and Gathie Barnett won a place in U.S. Reports after they refused, as Jehovah's Witnesses, to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag while elementary school students in West Virginia during World War II. Speaking for the 6-3 majority in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Justice Robert H. Jackson famously and quotably declared that in the United States "no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
      The majority opinions in the two new decisions pay obeisance to this principle, but it is window dressing for policy-driven results in both. The conservative bloc's true agenda, is palpable in the anti-union subtext in Justice Samuel Alito's opinion in Janus and in Justice Clarence Thomas's relative indifference in NIFLA toward pregnant women's interests in full information about their medical and legal options.
      The groups supporting Janus made no secret of their true intention of trying to weaken public sector unions and weaken their influence in election campaigns. In one fundraising letter, the anti-union Freedom Foundation promised that a ruling for Janus "should take the government unions out of the game for good."
      In NIFLA, the conservative justices' own policy preference was evident in Thomas's effort to reconcile the new decision with a seemingly contradictory ruling that was part of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Back then, the Court upheld a Pennsylvania law requiring doctors to inform a woman before an abortion about supposed health risks from the procedure and to give the woman information about the fetus: no compelled-speech problem found. Thomas was part of the majority on that part of the ruling, but a quarter-century later he drew the line at requiring the pregnancy centers to post a simple sign that low-cost public programs were available.
      Thomas explained that the Pennsylvania law was about informed consent before a medical procedure and the California law merely a plug for the state's programs. But as Justice Stephen G. Breyer explained in his dissent, pregnancy and childbirth are medical procedures: the California law, no less than the upheld Pennsylvania provision, was aimed at making sure pregnant women had complete information.
      Breyer aptly warned that the decision threatened other consumer protection provisions: as one example, he cited a California law requiring hospitals to inform new parents about child safety seats. And just two days later the Court told the federal appeals court in California that NIFLA might be grounds for striking down a local ordinance requiring cell phone providers to warn users that keeping a cell phone in a pocket might result in radiation exposure in excess of federal guidelines.
      In , Alito dissembled just as Thomas did by failing to make clear that the agency fees Janus and others were required to pay could not be used to pay for the union's political advocacy outside the collective bargaining context. As Justice Elena Kagan explained in dissent, "no part of those fees could go to any of the union's political or ideological activities." 
      The fallout from Janus will be broad and direct. The ruling invalidates laws in 22 states that allow public sector unions to charge agency fees to non-members. The unions in those states will take a financial hit, just as the anti-union funders for Janus wanted, and the hundreds of contracts negotiated with agency fees for non-members included presumably reopened.
      The 5-4 splits in the two decisions speak less to constitutional law than to raw politics. In her dissent in Janus, Kagan rightly complained that the majority was "turning the First Amendment into a sword and using it against workaday economic and regulatory policy." The First Amendment, she said, "was meant for better things."