Should Teachers Have to Pay for Gushing over Clinton? (Or Trump? Or Gary Johnson? Or…)?

At just about the same time FBI Director James Comey was discussing how “extremely careless” Hillary Clinton was with classified information during her time as Secretary of State, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, was tweeting this:

And this:

And doing this:

All of this, by the way, took place at the NEA’s national convention.


Now, is there anything wrong with a union endorsing and campaigning for a presidential candidate? Heck no! But there is a huge problem when teachers, as a condition of working at government schools, are required to furnish funds for those unions.


I know the response: The “agency fees” teachers in many states are compelled to supply only cover collective bargaining, which is not political. Of course, such bargaining is absolutely political—negotiating with government entities is inherently political — and somtimes coming in at 65 percent or more of full dues, a lot of agency fee money is almost certainly going to more than just collective bargaining and administrative stuff. And money is fungible. Dollars that free payers supply for collective bargaining ultimately frees up other bucks for, I don’t know, maybe straight‐​out politicking!


Sadly, as you probably know, the U.S. Supreme Court tied up on this 4 – 4 earlier this year, maintaining a lower court ruling that agency fees are not a violation of constitutional speech and association rights. But just because the Supreme Court stumbled doesn’t mean the political branches of government can’t act to end forced union funding. And from I saw on Twitter yesterday, justice requires that compelled support of unions end.