The Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court has barred public-employee contracts requiring workers to pay union dues, dealing a severe blow to perhaps the strongest remaining redoubt of the American labor movement.

The 5-4 vote, along conservative-liberal lines, on Wednesday overruled a 1977 precedent that had fueled the growth of public-sector unionization even as representation has withered in private industry. More than one-third of public employees are unionized, compared with just 6.5% of those in the private sector, according to a January report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The impact of the ruling is likely to stretch far beyond the workplace, sapping resources from unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Education Association that have provided funds, resources and activists largely in support of Democratic candidates. In the 2016 election cycle, public-sector unions spent $64.6 million on political activities, and 90% of that went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The largest spenders were the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions and AFSCME.

Still, total spending by all labor unions, $213.3 million in the 2016 cycle, was small relative to the $3.43 billion spent by businesses. That business spending was split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

Unions, which long have anticipated this day, have been preparing strategies to retain membership, but significant drops in support are likely.

Justice Samuel Alito, whose opinions have shaped the court’s turn against public-sector unions, wrote for the majority.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable,” even if they are part of collective bargaining that benefits that employee, affronts a “cardinal constitutional command,” he wrote. Justice Alito quoted Justice Robert Jackson’s 1943 opinion forbidding mandatory recitation of the flag salute in public school: the government may not “force citizens to confess by word or act” any opinion.

“In most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” Justice Alito wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Nothing about this particular context—states that had authorized public agencies to negotiate labor contracts similar to those in the private sector, and state and local bodies that approved such contracts—called for any different response, he said.

Plaintiff Mark Janus said he was “thrilled that the Supreme Court has restored not only my First Amendment rights, but the rights of millions of other government workers across the country.” Mr. Janus, a child-support specialist for the state government in Springfield, Ill., objected to a $45 monthly payroll deduction for Afscme Council 31, which negotiated the contract providing him wages and benefits.

“The right to say ‘no’ to a union is just as important as the right to say ‘yes,’” said Mr. Janus, who was recruited by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to serve as plaintiff after Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who initiated the case, was dismissed from the suit on procedural grounds.

For the court’s liberals, the decision Wednesday—the final day of this term—capped a term replete with disappointment.

“There’s no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” Justice Elena Kagan said from the bench. The majority, acting as “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices,” had stopped “the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance,” she said.

Joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Kagan accused the majority of “weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”

Some 20 states, principally in liberal-leaning regions such as the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, permit government agencies to reach union-security agreements with labor organizations, requiring employees within a bargaining unit either to join the union or pay it a fee for core services, such as negotiating and enforcing contracts.

Unions, which call such charges “fair-share fees,” say they are necessary to prevent free riders—employees who are happy to receive the raises, benefits and job security a union contract offers but prefer to let their co-workers foot the bill.

Although the government must respect many of its employees’ constitutional rights, a line of Supreme Court precedent gives public agencies more leeway when they act as employers, reasoning that managers need discretion in how they run their shops.

The 1977 precedent that the court has now overturned, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, reasoned that a public agency might find it beneficial to accept a union-security clause for the same reasons a private company might—ensuring labor peace, avoiding strikes and the like.

Abood held that objectors cannot be charged for union activities beyond collective bargaining, such as political campaigning.

But after the court tilted further to the right in 2006, with the appointment of Justice Alito, antiunion groups developed a challenge on the premise that anything a union does in relation to a government agency, including bargaining, is inherently political, because elected officials ultimately are responsible for its decisions.

Under that theory, it would violate the First Amendment for government to condition a job on subsidizing political speech a worker may oppose—and therefore public-employment contracts including union-security clauses would be unconstitutional. The court majority has now accepted that argument.

A pair of prior Alito opinions, adopted by 5-4 votes, had signaled to conservatives that justices would be receptive to that theory, and the court appeared poised to overrule the Abood precedent after arguments in January 2016. But with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia a month later, the court deadlocked 4-4 and left the 1977 rule in place.

After President Donald Trump appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the vacancy, however, it was clear that the reckoning for public-sector unions had only temporarily been postponed. Illinois, where Republican Gov. Rauner has been locked in conflict with public-employee unions since taking office in 2015, supplied the vehicle.

The theory behind Wednesday’s decision poses no immediate threat to union-security clauses in private-sector contracts. Unlike government agencies, private businesses generally aren’t required to respect free-speech rights and can establish various conditions of employment, including requiring fair-share fees, if permitted by state law.

This all started here in Wisconsin with Act 10 and Recallarama earlier this decade. Voters in this state twice decided that government employee unions should not have more power than taxpayers.

George Will:

“This,” exclaimed Margaret Thatcher, thumping Friedrich Hayek’s 500-page tome The Constitution of Liberty on a table in front of some Conservative Party colleagues, “is what we believe.” It also is what Bill Weld believes, which is why he aspires to be the Libertarian party’s 2020 presidential candidate.

The former twice-elected Republican governor of Massachusetts has been visiting Libertarian party state conventions and will be in New Orleans at the national convention from June 30 to July 3. There he will try to convince the party, which sometimes is too interested in merely sending a message (liberty is good), to send into the autumn of 2020 a candidate representing what a broad swath of Americans say they favor — limited government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, the rule of law, entitlement realism, and other artifacts from the Republican wreckage.

Once when a Democrat noted that Weld’s ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower, Weld replied, “Actually, they weren’t on the Mayflower. They sent the servants over first to get the cottage ready.” He was the 19th Weld — the first was in the Class of 1650 — to graduate from Harvard. Since then, the 20th and 21st have attended — two of the five children he had with his first wife, Theodore Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter. Two Harvard buildings are named for Welds. One of which John Kennedy lived in as a freshman.

Bill Weld, who majored in classics, took philosophy classes from Robert Nozick, whose Anarchy, State and Utopia, a canonical text of libertarianism, argues that “the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.” Weld served in Ronald Reagan’s administration for seven years, five years as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. He was recommended for this position by then-associate U.S. attorney general Rudy Giuliani, which was not Weld’s fault. Next, Weld was head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. There he brought from San Francisco, as his replacement in Massachusetts, a man “who might be the straightest guy I’ve ever met,” Robert Mueller.

Weld’s sandy-reddish hair is still abundant and, at 72, he is eager to build on his 2016 experience as the Libertarians’ vice-presidential nominee. During that campaign, “I carried around with me every day” the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Noting that the Articles of Confederation excellently referred to powers not “expressly” delegated, Weld says, “I might have been an anti-Federalist.” Imagine having a president who knows that there were anti-Federalists.

The top of the Libertarians’ 2016 ticket was another ex-governor, New Mexico’s Gary Johnson, who was too interested in marijuana and not interested enough in Syria to recognize the name Aleppo. Weld, however, is ready for prime time.

During a recent breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel across Lafayette Square from the White House (the Adamses reached these shores shortly after the Welds), Weld recalled how as governor he taught agencies to not expect “last year’s appropriation plus 5 percent.” He cut taxes 21 times and raised none. A believer in freedom for what Nozick called “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” Weld says his most satisfying achievement was cutting the 6 percent tax on long-term capital gains by 1 point for each year the asset is held.

If the florid face of today’s snarling GOP wants to be re-nominated, he will be. Five-hundred days into his presidency he had 87 percent approval among Republicans, 10 points above Ronald Reagan’s rating at 500 days. And in the autumn of 2019, upward of 20 Democratic presidential aspirants might clog the stages at “debates” that could become contests to see who can most arrestingly pander to activists — a disproportionate slice of the nominating electorate — who are enamored of “Medicare for all,” government-guaranteed jobs, and generally gobs of free stuff (college tuition, etc.).

If in autumn 2020 voters face a second consecutive repulsive choice, there will be running room between the two deplorables. Because of its 2016 efforts, the Libertarian party will automatically be on 39 states’ ballots this fall and has a sufficient infantry of volunteers to secure ballot access in another nine. So, if the Libertarian party is willing, 2020’s politics could have an ingredient recently missing from presidential politics: fun. And maybe a serious disruption of the party duopoly that increasing millions find annoying. Stranger things have happened, as a glance across Lafayette Square confirms.

There is one problem Will doesn’t bring up, but the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action did in 2016:

The Washington Post:

The White House on Thursday proposed the most comprehensive plan to reorganize the federal government in 100 years, including a merger of the departments of Education and Labor, and a proposal to add work requirements for welfare programs.

“Businesses change all the time,” said White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. “Government doesn’t, and one of the things you get when you hire a businessman to become president is you bring this attitude from the private sector.”

The sweeping reorganization plan stems from an order signed by Mr. Trump in March 2017 calling for a review of the federal government to streamline agencies and reduce waste. The combined education and labor department would be called the Department of Education and the Workforce, or DEW, and would oversee programs for students and workers.

In a presentation to the Cabinet, Mr. Mulvaney cited examples of bringing all food-safety regulations under the Agriculture Department, instead of sharing those responsibilities with the Food and Drug Administration.

“If it’s cheese pizza, it’s FDA, but you put pepperoni on it and it becomes a USDA product. I mean, come on?” he said. “An open-faced roast beef sandwich is USDA, a closed-faced roast beef sandwich is FDA. Not making this up. You can’t make this kind of stuff up. This would only happen in the government.”

The plan would also move the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, from the USDA to Health and Human Services, which would be renamed the Department of Health and Public Welfare and oversee public assistance programs.

“We’re still dealing with a government that is from the early 20th century,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “It simply doesn’t make sense.”

In merging the Departments of Education and Labor, Mr. Mulvaney said, the government’s 47-odd job-training programs could be reduced to 16.

The plan also would privatize the U.S. Postal Service.

The reorganization plan faces an uncertain fate in Congress, with some Democrats and unions representing the federal workforce saying it has no chance of being approved.

“Democrats and Republicans in Congress have rejected President Trump’s proposals to drastically gut investments in education, health care, and workers — and he should expect the same result for this latest attempt to make government work worse for the people it serves,” said Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat.

But Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the plan deserves serious consideration in Congress.

“The vast majority of people I ask believe the federal government is badly broken,” Mr. Johnson said. “That is why I am so pleased to see this administration thinking big and ‘outside the box’ to bring effective reform and reorganization to a government structure developed for the previous century. I pledge to do everything I can to support this effort to make the government more efficient and effective for the 21st century.”

American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr. called the overhaul proposal “an unprecedented power grab” that has nothing to do with improving the efficiency or effectiveness of government.

“We are particularly alarmed over proposals to privatize both the U.S. Postal Service and our federal air traffic control system,” Mr. Cox said. He asserted most of the proposals target “domestic programs that have long been unpopular with anti-government ideologues: merging the Education and Labor departments, removing the food stamp and school meal programs from USDA, and breaking up the personnel agency that administers federal employee background investigations, retirement claims and benefits, and employment policies.”

“These proposals are out of touch and demonstrative of a president who not only does not respect the hard work of federal employees, but does not understand their expertise, service, or value,” he said.

If you’re getting paid, you’re not performing “service”; you are either an employee or a contractor. “Service” is something you do for no pay.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, a former Labor secretary under President Obama, said Mr. Trump’s proposal to move the federal food stamp program to a new agency “opens the door for him to fulfill a longtime Republican goal of gutting​ social safety programs Americans rely on, including SNAP and Medicaid benefits.​”

“Trump is attempting to play political games with our education and our workforce in order to please his base,” Mr. Perez said.

“Please his base”? My paws and whiskers! Trump must be the first politician in the history of our supposed democracy to advocate something to please his base. The temerity! (End sarcasm.)

The merits of any particular part of this aside (and I think the Education and Labor departments should not be combined; they should be ended),