An important thing to remember about politics in America is that since the New Deal, Republicans have consistently known who their enemies were while Democrats have slowly forgotten who their supporters were supposed to be. The last major piece of labor legislation in this country was the Taft-Hartley act, passed in 1947 over Harry Truman’s veto. One of the first things Republicans did after retaking power in Congress in 1946 was launch a direct assault on labor unions which at the time made up the Democrats’ core base. So called “right to work” States were justifiably outlawed under the Wagner Act (1935) but Taft-Hartley opened that door and dark money soon stepped in to divide and conquer workers and bring us to the point today where 28 states are “right to work”.

The Republican assault on unions has been a decades long political project that has paid serious dividends in terms of both political power for them and economic power for the owners of capital over workers. Perhaps the greatest success of this project has been their coopting of Republicans’ nominal opponents, the Democratic Party. Every Democratic president since 1947 has paid lip service to unions but none has had the will or ability to implement “card check” which would both vastly increase the power of workers and expand the base of voters that labor friendly Democrats could rely on. By getting Democrats to drink from the poisoned chalice of corporate money the assault on unions has succeeded in blurring the differences between the parties, leading to what we saw in 2016 where a corporate Republican like Donald Trump trounced the Democratic nominee in states that were once the backbone of the Union movement in this country.

The Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision, a blatant attack on public sector unions, is the next step in the process. Private sector union representation in America has fallen from a high of ~33% to around 6.5% today but ~34% of public sector workers are still in a union. Business forces simply need to get that number down before they’ll be able to raid public pensions, engage in mass layoffs of public sector workers, and do everything they can to transfer public money to private banks and hedge funds in the name of austerity.

The Supreme Court decision is a disgrace but it is not a surprise. I hope it, along with the court’s upholding of the Muslim Ban, will further dispel the illusion that the high court in America has anything to do with law or justice. It is a political body consisting of unelected members with lifetime appointments who draft legislation for the benefit of corporate America. The solution though is quite simple and must be demanded of every Democratic candidate for office. We must harken back to the last great labor union president and we must succeed where he failed. We must pack the Supreme Court.