Today’s DC Examiner has an editorial about the Foundation’s upcoming US Supreme Court case, Daniel Locke v. Karass.

Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

Locke is one of 20 Maine state employees who found that their compulsory agency fees to the Maine State Employees Association were being used to fund union lawsuits and bargaining in other states via a funding pool administered by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Locke and his like-minded colleagues objected to having to pay the fees because they knew the SEIU aggressively pushes a political agenda outside of Maine, including political campaigning, lobbying government at all levels, litigation against employers, media advocacy and other non-bargaining activities. Every dollar taken from Locke to pay for union litigation outside Maine freed up a dollar to be spent on SEIU’s political agenda.

Sounds like an open-and-shut case, right? After all, Thomas Jefferson said it was “sinful and tyrannical” to “compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves.” And just last year, the court ruled that public employee unions must first get permission from individual members before using their dues for political activities. Justice Antonin Scalia declared that “unions have no constitutional entitlement to the fees of nonmember employees.”

But things are never so simple in the nation’s capital. U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement has submitted a brief in the case in which he argues that public employee unions can indeed use agency fees to pay their share of a litigation pool.

But, he says, doing so must further the government’s interest in keeping the peace in the workplace. He also says the union must give reasonable assurance that the pool doesn’t indirectly aid non-litigation activities.

In other words, as long as there is peace in the workplace and wink-winks from the union, President Bush’s solicitor general will be happy. And this president is anti-union?

Read the whole thing here.