Illinois' Overlooked and Unprecedented Big Labor Bonanza
Plus Biden's Silence on China's White Paper Revolution and the Spurious Trump Special Counsel
Illinois Is Pushing Back Against the Anti-Union Tide
In 2018, public-sector labor unions suffered what was seen at the time as a crippling blow: The Supreme Court ruled that they could no longer require non-members to pay collective bargaining costs.
The Janus v. AFSCME ruling was seen as a crowning victory for proponents of state “right to work” laws barring unions from forcing workers to bear such costs as a condition of employment. Public-sector employees nationwide would now enjoy the same freedoms as their private-sector counterparts in the more than half of all states that had enacted right-to-work measures, recently including Rust Belt labor strongholds Michigan and Wisconsin.
But four years later, Illinois, where Janus originated, has bucked the Rust Belt right-to-work trend in a big way. In November, voters there passed a constitutional amendment expanding and entrenching the power of public unions, and protecting private ones, in unprecedented ways. Coming a decade after voters in neighboring Michigan defeated a similar such referendum, it’s a significant if overlooked development in this year’s midterm elections.
I’ve got the story on what could be the canary in the coal mine for coming progressive public-sector activism — and the consequences for taxpayers effectively underwriting it — in a new report for RealClearInvestigations.
In other recent pieces:
Where Is America’s Voice on Anti-Xi Protests? In the Epoch Times, I asked whether the Biden family’s Beijing influence-peddling has anything to do with the administration’s amazingly weak response to the Chinese Communist Party’s tyranny in the face of the White Paper Revolution. I cut a video for Straight Arrow News on this topic as well.
Relatedly, I had the pleasure of speaking with Liz Wheeler at length at NatCon 3 about China’s elite capture of Americans, and how to combat it. Check it out below:
Appointment of Special Counsel Amounts to Election Interference and Sets Dangerous Precedent Last but not least, also in the Epoch Times I wrote about the hypocrisy of “our democracy” defenders’ undertaking of the singularly anti-democratic act of siccing a hyper-politicized law enforcement apparatus on a candidate for the highest elected office, on dubious grounds, thereby subverting the political process by which we decide who represents us.
At a minimum, as I argue, no doubt to an approving President Joe Biden, his law-enforcement arm is now engaged in what amounts to election interference against arguably the president’s top challenger—ironically probing in part former President Donald Trump’s alleged interference with the transfer of power in 2020, when Trump could make the case that the deep state did the same to him from the inception of Russiagate in 2016 onward.