Today’s Wall Street Journal features this excellent editorial on a hideous piece of legislation currently in Congress, a bill that would mandate public sector collective bargaining across the nation. This would be a gigantic wet kiss for Big Labor.
It would also be flagrantly unconstitutional. Congress has no authority to dictate employment conditions for state and local workers. (In fact, it doesn’t really have authority to dictate it in the private sector, but thanks to some abominable Supreme Court decisions long ago that annihilated the Constitution’s intended restraints on federal power, it has been exercising such power since the New Deal.) Also, the Constitution counts for very little in Washington.
