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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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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Who’s the face of the GOP opposition?

Was I wrong?

http://chicagoargus.blogspot.com/2008/11/if-obama-is-harold-then-whos-national.html

NOT REALLY, WHICH is kind of sad when you think about it.

It was just over one year ago (on the day that Barack Obama won election to a four-year term as president, to be exact) that I wrote a commentary that I wish reflected bad on my comprehension of electoral politics.

It was a piece of analysis wondering how close the Obama administration’s ability to govern would come to those years from the mid-1980s that we now recall as “Council Wars” on account of the fact that a vocal opposition did whatever it could to thwart the governmental desires of then-Mayor Harold Washington.

About the only aspect of that commentary where I wrote that a segment of the U.S. population would, “spend the next four years doing whatever they can to thwart an Obama presidency from achieving its goals” that hasn’t fully come true is the part where I pondered which politico would become the national equivalent of Edward R. Vrdolyak.

IN ALL HONESTY, none of them seem to have become the “face” of the opposition the way that Vrdolyak is still remembered as the namesake of the City Council opposition that openly defied everything Washington tried to do during his first couple of years as Chicago mayor.

Which means either that this particular band of political people either is somewhat bland, or personalities such as that belonging to “Fast Eddie” are a rare breed indeed.

I’m sure that Sarah Palin’s followers would like to think that the one-time Alaska governor has that kind of pull about her to lead people in opposition to Obama. Yet I don’t count her because at this point, she’s all talk.

She has no political position with authority that can be used. She can only try to shame the Republican members of Congress into going along with her will, which is the same as Rush Limbaugh and the assorted right-wing rabble that wishes they had Rush’s ratings and “talent” when they go “on the air.”

BUT LOOKING AT this first year of the Obama administration makes me realize that the same mentality that once inspired 29 aldermen to band together to vote against anything Washington even hinted he liked is the same that creates the partisan political votes for what may well have been the two big accomplishments from the federal government this year – getting the Senate to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court justice and to approve a health care reform package that (while watered down considerably) still gets criticism as being “too radical.”

The mentality that allowed some members of Congress in good conscience to think we’d be better off doing nothing to resolve the situation of some 47 million U.S. residents without any form of health insurance is the same as the one that once allowed members of Congress to refuse to confirm mayoral appointments for years (meaning some people ultimately got confirmed to positions whose terms had already expired).

Some people thought that a short-term loss related to the daily operations of government would be beneficial in the long run if it meant preventing anything that a “disliked” chief executive might well be able to use as an “accomplishment.”

There are those who will try to give Obama credit for getting through a health care reform proposal (assuming, of course, that the measure is not killed off by a conference committee that can’t resolve differences between the Senate and House of Representatives’ versions of the bill), while others will claim that the big victors of 2009 were the Republican officials who were able to make Obama’s professional life so difficult.

FOR MY PART, I’m thankful that the U.S. Senate literally wound up this year with that “filibuster-proof” majority. For if there really were 41 Republican members of the U.S. Senate, then we likely would have had our government achieve absolutely nothing during the previous year. Which is why the 2010 elections will be interesting.

It usually happens that the opposition political party to the president gains some strength in the mid-term elections. And even if you believe there isn’t going to be a massive shift in political power during the upcoming year, all it will take is for a couple of states to shift and we really will get the stalemate that was “Council Wars” to occur on Capitol Hill.

Ultimately, the cheap rhetoric and namecalling that bordered on racial slurs was embarrassing to Chicago. But it was the willingness of some Chicago officials to do nothing out of spite to the chief executive that was the real shame of that political era in the mid-1980s.

I would like to think that we won’t experience the same offensive silliness some nearly three decades later on the national level.

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Will nativists make La Raza Sotomayor’s version of Obama’s Bill Ayers?

Bill Ayers is the education professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago whom social conservatives tried last year to turn into a millstone around the neck of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama because of Ayer’s activist days against the Vietnam War.

It failed. Most people saw through the cheap rhetoric and considered it a non-issue.

YET THOSE SAME conservatives seem to be trying the technique again. Only now, we’re hearing about the National Council of La Raza and the fact that Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, has been a supporter.

I’d like to think the cheap rhetoric will again be ignored (how else to explain the absurd comments from former Congressman Tom Tancredo). That means I’m putting my faith in the intelligence of the American people.

It just seems that the same people who remember the name “Willie Horton” and the way it helped take down the 1988 presidential dreams of Michael Dukakis will spend their lives trying to come up with symbols meant to scare the public, rather than trying to find a solution to the problem. Of course, those people largely ARE the problem.

For those interested in learning more about the latest demonization of La Raza, this site’s sister weblog The South Chicagoan (http://southchicagoan.blogspot.com/) offers a detailed commentary worth reading.

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