That case reached the Supreme Court in the fall of 2015. After argument on November 1, the anti-union forces seemed to be on the verge of victory. Then, in February 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. Without his deciding vote, the Court was tied and affirmed the Ninth Circuit, 4 to 4. Abood, improbably, still lived.

But while Friedrichs was pending, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner had asked a federal court to decide that he didn’t have to follow Illinois’s state-employee-union statutes any more, since they were probably going to be unconstitutional any day now. The federal court responded that having to follow state laws isn’t an “injury” to a governor, so Rauner had no “standing”; in fact, there was no case.

At that point, Mark Janus, an Illinois state social worker who opposes agency fees, asked to join the case. The court allowed him to do so, even though, legally, there was no case for him to join—and then dismissed Janus’s claims because of Abood. He appealed; this week his case reached the Supreme Court, encumbered by no more facts than was Friedrichs.

In Monday’s argument, Francisco’s casual ignorance of labor statistics was not the only gap in the advocates’s knowledge. Messenger, the Right-to-Work fund lawyer, assured the justices that unions who represent non-members don’t incur any additional expense by doing so; he gave no source for this, simply his assertion that “there’s no reason why” it shouldn’t be so. Upending the labor law of 23 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico would be no big deal either, he said. “I submit the contracts will survive.” When Justice Elena Kagan asked him whether the contracts in those states had “severability” clauses (which would make the disruption slightly less), he admitted, “I couldn’t find a number for the public sector,” but added that he had “anecdotal” experience that many contracts do have such clauses.

Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that California, in a brief supporting the union, contended precisely the opposite. Messenger dismissed that claim without really answering it, and pointed out that contracts eventually expire anyway.

David Franklin, who argued for the state of Illinois in defense of its “agency fee” law, told the Court that Messenger had been wrong to focus on the cost of contract negotiations. Unions also must represent workers in grievance proceedings, he noted, and that costs money: “We don’t know what percentage of the union’s activities are wrapped up with grievances.” In fact, he said, grievance-representation costs “can be three times, six times, seven times as much … [as] the line for collective bargaining. So to decide this case in an evidentiary vacuum on the basis of assumptions about how that speech breaks down or how those expenses break down would in our view be irresponsible.”