EXTRA: 5-4; How predictable!

I wish I could say I was shocked and appalled Wednesday morning, but I’m really not.

KAGAN: Former U of C prof wrote dissent

Shocked, at least.

FOR THE SUPREME Court of the United States issued the ruling that had been feared by anybody with a sense of fairness toward people who work for a living.

In Janus vs. AFSCME Council 31 (which represents state government workers right here in Illinois), the high court ruled that those employees were having their right to free expression infringed upon by having union dues deducted from their paychecks.

The effect of the ruling is that labor unions are getting harassed in ways meant to undermine their influence and ability to protect the interests of their members – the people who do the work.

That is the intent. The people who favor this ruling are the ones who want to undermine organized labor, and they’re hoping that by making it more difficult for unions to collect the dues upon which they rely for their operating funds, they can undermine their ability to serve their role.

BASICALLY, IT’S THE ruling for those people who are upset that Illinois has never shown any inclination to become a “right to work” state – a place where union membership cannot be required to have a job and where companies are given free reign to do whatever they can in order to discourage their workers from even wanting to have union representation.

RAUNER: He's happy, but not for long?

This ruling actually was anticipated. It was figured by many that the growing ideological margin among the high court’s composition would result in an anti-labor ruling.

Sure enough, the 5-4 vote was purely partisan – with Justice Elena Kagan (a one-time University of Chicago Law School professor) writing the dissent and Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing an additional legal opinion in support of her.

About the only person I can think of who is truly pleased is Gov. Bruce Rauner, since such a ruling fits in completely with his vision that government needs to completely undermine organized labor influence – a view that is the reason many believe he’s likely to get tossed out of office on his keister come the Nov. 6 elections.

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Is Gorsuch in the Trump dog house?

Neil Gorsuch is the man who sits on the Supreme Court of the United States because of the ideologue gamesmanship that denied former President Barack Obama a third pick to the high court; thereby allowing Donald Trump the ability to fill the vacancy in the early days of his presidency.

GORSUCH: Confounds ideologues?

Meaning I’m sure that Trump expects Gorsuch to be his reliable vote to take his stance on all issues that come before the court, and also to sway a majority of the rest of the court to do so as well.

WHICH IS WHY I’m finding some humor in the Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday that struck down a law meant to make it easier (and quicker) to deport non-citizens who are found guilty of violent crimes while in this country.

The nine-member court voted 5-4 to rule in favor of striking down the law, agreeing with a federal appeals court in San Francisco that said it was too vague to be enforceable.

Gorsuch wound up siding with the four members of the court who usually are of a more progressive leaning on issues, even though Gorsuch is supposed to be the swing vote that gives the conservative-leaning justices the numerical advantage.

When considering that Trump is trying to base his political strength from having the support of those people whose idea of immigration reform is to deport as many people as possible, I don’t doubt that Trump felt a bit of disgust when he was informed of the court’s decision.

NOT THAT IT’S a surprise to see a judge place the law above political partisanship. It’s the way things are supposed to be, even though in this Age of Trump we have people who think that their partisanship is meant to prevail over all.

SOUTER: Often offended GOP pols

Anybody who pays attention to the Supreme Court knows there have been many justices who ruled on various cases in ways that went against the political desires of the presidents who appointed them.

Although I’m not ready to put Gorsuch in the same ranks as now-retired Justice David Souter. Remember the man appointed by former President George H.W. Bush whom his chief of staff, John Sununu, initially described as a “home run” for conservatism?

Souter wound up being a justice who aligned himself in his votes with the justices who were appointed to the court by former President Bill Clinton. He also was a justice who, in a case concerning abortion, wrote that doing anything to outlaw it would be, “a surrender to political pressure” and was amongst the court minority in 2000 who wanted to continue the recount of the presidential election ballots in Florida – when the act halting it is what gave us “President George W. Bush” instead of the man who nationally got more votes, Democrat Al Gore.

KAGAN: Wrote for the Ct majority

I’M SURE GORSUCH will come up with several votes on court cases that will appease the ideologues and Trump.

But like I wrote earlier, it is somewhat humorous to see Trump’s appointee be the guy who votes in a way that won’t appease the ideologues on immigration. Which is particularly odd in that this case originally came before the high court during the year that Republicans were thwarting Obama’s attempt to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with Merrick Garland.

This same immigration case (based off the situation of a man from the Philippines who was found guilty of burglary in California) got a 4-4 vote then, which caused officials to want to re-argue the case with a full court – figuring that now they’d get a 5-4 vote in their favor.

Instead, they got a 5-4 vote against them, on the grounds that calling burglary a “crime of violence” was a bit of a stretch and that the law didn't really specify what a "crime of violence" was.

GORSUCH WOUND UP siding with the majority that let Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (the old University of Chicago law school professor and an Obama appointee) write the opinion that will all up in arms in the near future about “too many foreigners” in this country.

TRUMP: Temper tantrum in Oval Office?

Personally, I think we have too many ideologues in this country. I also wonder if Kagan will be another reason for Trump to go on a "hate Chicago" diatribe. But those are issues for us to ponder another day.

Because you just know the ideologues will find something else to get all hot-and-bothered about. They usually always find something to get ticked off about, no matter what happens in "real" life.

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A duel between the 1st and 2nd cities

It seems we now have something resembling a good ol’ fashioned Chicago/New York brawl on our hands, and not because the Yankees are in town (that won't happen until the end of August).

I got my kick out of seeing the provincialism of the Chicago newspapers versus their New York counterparts, both of which seemed determined to claim that new Supreme Court of the United States nominee Elena Kagan is really a hometown girl – one of our very own.

THE FACT IS that she is a New Yorker who lived and worked for a few years in Chicago. But that didn’t stop the stories in both cities that tried to claim Kagan was truly a native of their own boundaries.

Which amuses me, makes me laugh, because for all the blowharded talk that we get from people in both municipalities about how chic and sophisticated they are and how the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the Midwest in the case of Chicago) looks to them as a role model, we can be so rube-ish at times.

You’d think we were French Lick, Ind. – going on and on even now about how one-time pro basketball star Larry Bird once lived there.

But that was the level of boosterism we got from the Chicago Sun-Times, which managed to come up with a picture of Kagan from back when she was on the University of Chicago law school faculty. Not that she was doing anything academic – she is seen with a bat in her hands playing softball.

THE 16-INCH KIND, the newspaper tells us. Although the look in her eyes is just a little too clear for her to be all liquored up like many an aging Chicagoan who plays the slow pitch game because they can’t handle anything more athletically challenging.

Of course, that wasn’t the only tidbit we got from The Bright One.

We also learn the address of Kagan’s apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood (which makes me wonder if the landlord will now use this factoid to justify a significant rent increase to the current occupant – hey, a “celebrity” once lived there), that she was a regular in the lunches held by the law school faculty and that she occasionally treated her students to lunch at Café Ba Ba Reeba.

I feel like the tapas place on North Halsted Street owes somebody some money for the free publicity they just received.

AS IT TURNS out, Kagan was like many an out-of-towner whose work brings them to Chicago. She left the Second City when a better job opportunity came along. In her case, it was a chance to work at the White House under then-President Bill Clinton.

Clinton even tried to make her a judge, but partisan politics (against William J., not Elena personally) caused the appointment to stall.

The University of Chicago wasn’t all that enthused, according to the Sun-Times, about having her come back just so she could wait out her time for another political appointment. So that is what ultimately caused her to leave the shores of Lake Michigan, ultimately settling in at the law school at Harvard University.

While some might think it was her presence there that gave her resume the substance that caused President Barack Obama to choose her for the spot of replacing retiring justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, one can’t underplay the significance of her time along the Midway Plaissance.

IT WAS THERE that Kagan and Obama met (he was the one-time instructor at the U of C law school). Any personal tie that would have developed between the two that would give her the edge over other potential nominees (including Diane Wood, the one-time Chicago law school professor who is a federal appeals judge for the Northern Illinois district, who some thought would be the local “favorite” to get a high court nomination) occurred in the Second City.

In short, New Yorker Kagan had to come to Chicago to find herself. And a little piece of our city is likely to be with her no matter what ultimately becomes of her life or how long she winds up serving on the Supreme Court (at 50, she has the potential for decades of public service as a high court justice).

One point I did find amusing was the angle played up by the New York Daily News – the one that stated Kagan was a long-time New York Mets fans, compared to Obama’s other appointment to the Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor has never done a thing to hide the fact that her baseball loyalties lie with the New York Yankees. Are we going to have judicial “brawls” everytime the two teams take each other on every season?

POSSIBLY. BUT I think the better comparison lies between Kagan and Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton.

For the Sun-Times reported that Kagan used to go to Chicago White Sox games when she lived here in the early 1990s (back in the days when Frank Thomas was an undisputed star hitter who still played first base). So Kagan is a Mets fan who took to watching the White Sox.

By comparison, the one-time Hillary Rodham grew up in the Chicago suburbs, rooted for the Chicago Cubs, then took to cheering for the Yankees (occasionally wearing their cap) when she moved to New York to become a U.S. senator in the 2000s.

It sounds to me like Elena is the anti-Hillary, at least on the baseball diamond. And that may be more interesting than any of the other trivial tidbids we got from our newspapers on Tuesday.

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