All the expenses, in other words, are non-chargeable.

Scalia appeared skeptical of that argument, but it went over with three of the other four conservatives. (Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, said nothing.) In essence, the three conservatives seemed to think that everything in government is completely corrupt and unions are just a part of the statist conspiracy—a special interest in league with big-government Democrats.

Justice Alito, the author of Knox, took point Wednesday. “Governor Blagojevich got a huge campaign contribution from the union and virtually as soon as he got into office he took out his pen and signed an executive order that had the effect of putting, what was it, $3.6 million into the union coffers?” Verilli responded that after Blagojevich’s order, a bipartisan majority in the legislature had ratified the decision to classify the home care providers as state employees eligible to unionize.

Alito next argued that union members may not want all these supposed benefits: “Now, what do you say to the young employee who is not very much concerned at this point about pensions, but realizes there's a certain pot of money, and it's either going to go for pensions or it's going to go for salary at the present time[?]”

Paul Smith, representing the union, noted that the workers had gotten hefty raises since voting to form a union. Alito scoffed. “The State can say, this is how much these people are being paid, it's not enough, we want to increase it, we want to increase it by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, whatever it is. . . . Why do they need to have the union intervene here?”

Chief Justice John Roberts seemed obsessed with the idea that this case concerns “Medicaid reimbursement rates.” (It doesn’t; the home-care providers are paid in part with Medicaid funds, but are hourly employees who get regular paychecks from the state, unlike doctors or other professionals, who get reimbursement from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.) For him, Medicaid has been hijacked by the nanny state—in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, he wrote that Medicaid “is no longer a program to care for the neediest among us, but rather an element of a comprehensive national plan to provide universal health insurance coverage.” Now he asked Verilli, “if the union wants to talk about Medicaid rates with the State because they would get a higher wage or could get a higher wage if Medicaid reimbursement was higher, is that within the -- their functioning as a union rather than a political group?” Verilli said that it would almost certainly not be.

Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that public-employee unions are bad because they deal with government. “Suppose the young person thinks that the State is squandering his heritage on unnecessary and excessive payments or benefits and wages. Is that not a political belief of the highest order?. . . [Y]our position is that the public employees must surrender a substantial amount of First Amendment rights to work for the government?”