New at TheWeek.Com: A creative solution for saving labor rights
Responding to the Cedar Point SCOTUS decision: How can lawmakers protect organizing rights against a hostile Supreme Court? Buy them.
Cedar Point striking down California's regulations giving farmworker organizers access to corporate farms sucks- but there is a clear way for legislators to take on the Court's expanded "takings" rulings and protect progressive policy, as I write at TheWeek.com in “A creative solution for saving labor rights.”
As I write, the key is the Fifth Amendment only stops "uncompensated" takings, but government can always purchase access to property for whatever public purposes we deem necessary.
Only question is the price - and most of the time, minor intrusions on employer property just don't justify much payment to the property owners. As in a quite famous takings case that still only got the owner's minor compensation in the end.
Here's the kicker: since buying easements for organizers is a spending provision, not a regulatory action, we could drive a federal response to Cedar Point through reconciliation - and give union organizers access to employer property in every industry.
Congressional Democrats, thumbing their noses at both Roberts and McConnell, would be a particularly satisfying response to Cedar Point. And it would make clear that any right-wing legal move by the court will be met with creative countermoves by progressives.
So read the whole piece here.