The grass doesn’t grow under their feet, and not just because it’s all dying in our deregulated business-friendly country anyway. As soon as John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee in Shelby County, Republican secretaries of state around the country were ready to leap into action with voter-suppression strategies plucked right off the shelves. Those strategies, of course, subsequently have been blessed by a series of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, including two of the last ones joined by Anthony Kennedy of Dignified Integritude.

Now, in the immediate wake of the Janus ruling, which essentially turns the United States into a right-to-work country, we see a similar phenomenon unfolding, courtesy of the Koch Brothers and their ever-extending political tentacles. From Bloomberg:

The conservative nonprofit Freedom Foundation said that starting Wednesday, it will deploy 80 people to a trio of West Coast union bastions: California, Oregon and its home state of Washington. The canvassers were hired in March and trained this month, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. The goal of the multi-pronged campaign is to shrink union ranks in the three states by 127,000 members—and to offer an example for similar efforts targeting unions around the country. “Their employer isn’t going to tell them, and the union isn’t going to tell them,” said the anti-union group’s labor policy director, Maxford Nelsen. “So it falls to organizations like the Freedom Foundation to take up that mantle and make sure that public employees are informed of their constitutional rights.”

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The Freedom Foundation has been waiting for this moment. In February, it began acquiring lists of workers and identifying public employees to feature in anti-union videos. This month, it has been assembling materials to provide to sympathetic local-government human resources departments and readying a toll-free call center. Now that the ruling has come to pass, the group plans a flood of social media, mail, email, cable television ads, op-eds and phone calls to spread the news about employees’ opportunity to cease paying union fees. Along with going door-to-door, the anti-union activists plan to visit government buildings at which public employees work.

You know, if I were a cynical and very uncivil blogger type, I might remark that it almost seems like the political operation knew the ruling was coming and acted accordingly. I might comment on how ready that operation was and how quickly it moved.

‘Twas always thus, of course. In an article for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, James Gray Pope points out how ready white supremacists were for the blessing they received from the Supreme Court in the Cruikshank case in 1876.

The evidence suggests, however, that Bradley’s ruling precipitated a decisive tipping point.308 In the spring of 1874, white supremacists closely monitored the Cruikshank trial. Their newspapers called openly for the creation of paramilitary units to remove Republican officials from office, but the norm of law and order held…Bradley’s ruling abruptly upset the equilibrium. Democratic newspapers heralded the end of enforcement, and a “wildfire blaze” of paramilitary activity swept Louisiana, leading to the ouster of Republican officials from no fewer than twelve parishes.310 The timing of these ejections bears out the perception of contemporary observers that Bradley had triggered the surge in terror.311 As recounted above, it was not long before Democratic paramilitaries, emboldened by their Louisiana victories, spread the offensive to other Republican controlled states, contributing to the “redemption” of Alabama in 1874 and Mississippi in 1875.312

This is not domestic terrorism, God knows, but there’s other ways for contrived inequality to strike at the heart of self-government. Sometimes, the snake sleeps—but it’s always a snake. Ni shagu nazad.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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