And so it is with Citizens United. Whether it had ruled on statutory or constitutional grounds, I think the Court was actually right to hold that the FEC didn’t have the authority to suppress the broadcast of Hillary: the Movie! But in reaching this correct outcome, the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide the case, which might have been OK except that the Court’s ruling resulted in the preemptive acceptance of vastly less compelling First Amendment claims.

In the early 1930s, the Teamsters were already a conservative and often corrupt union, particularly in the upper eschelons of leadership. But the locals were a different story. Because they organized truck drivers, the workplace of teamsters was the road. They saw a lot of worksites and talked to a lot of different people. They developed a strong sense of solidarity with other workers and their struggles. On the local level, this atmosphere could help generate radicalism. Such was the case in Minneapolis where members of the Communist League of America took control of Local 574. By working in the coldest, harshest conditions, they organized the coal drivers in the winter of 1934, forcing employers to cave so that coal could be delivered. This success led truckers to join Local 574 in droves.

Minneapolis was a vociferously anti-union city. Knowing that the employers would absolutely refuse any of their demands, the most important of which was union recognition and the sole right as bargaining agent, as well as the ability to represent workers inside the distribution centers, the communist union organizers prepared for this strike well. They had discussions with local farmers about how not to hurt them with the strike. They rented a large building for strike headquarters and organized a Ladies’ Auxiliary to help feed and support the men on strike through any number of actions that included daily demonstrations.

Local 574 called the strike for May 16, despite opposition from the national leadership, a group that the radical leaders of the local effectively ignored whenever possible. The strike escalated quickly, as police responses were harsh and violent. On May 19, strikers were attempted to stop scab drivers from unloading a truck when the cops started beating them. Injured strikers were dragged back to strike headquarters where more fighting followed that left 2 police officers unconscious on the street. The powerbrokers of Minneapolis responded by expanding the Citizens Alliance. This was a pro-industry quasi-vigilante group that had existed in Minneapolis since 1903, dedicated to creating “industrial peace.” In this case, they did so by serving as armed strikebreakers. Combining with the cops, the forces of order sought to crack heads on May 21, attempting to open the major distribution center for deliveries. Cops attacked strikers who were trying to stop a truck from moving. Hundreds of strikes ran over to help them, cops pulled their weapons, and it’s possible that the only reason large numbers of people didn’t die that day is because the Teamsters drove a truck into the middle of it, splitting the cops into 2 sections and creating a scenario where they’d have to shoot at each other if they were to shoot strikers. The next day, fighting resumed, leading to the deaths of one cop and one leader of the Citizens’ Alliance.

One thing I appreciate about many strikes from this period is the sophisticated understanding of how to gain support for strikes by allowing certain kinds of economic activities to take place. For instance, the Teamsters could have shut down all trade within Minneapolis. But these guys, well-versed in ideas of solidarity, saw that in doing so, they would hurt local farmers. So they allowed local farmers to trade their goods in the city, but directly to stores rather in the big market area targeted by the strike. This helped build support around the region.

At this point, the governor of Minnesota, Floyd Olson, took a leading role in mediating the strike. He mobilized the National Guard but did not call it in because he didn’t want to alienate the labor unions who had voted him into office, Instead, he negotiated an agreement on May 25. But the strike only ended briefly because the employes reneged on much of the agreement by early June, refusing to allow the IBT to organize the distribution center workers. The union ordered its members to not carry weapons of any kind at this point. The cops on the other hand, armed themselves to the teeth.

On July 20, 50 armed police escorted a truck to make a delivery. The strikers, wielding clubs and other homemade weapons, stopped the truck. The police opened fire with buckshot. 2 strikers died and 67 were wounded. On July 26, Governor Olson declared martial law and ordered the markets open for business. Olson called 4000 members of the National Guard and began escorting trucks into the marketplace. On August 1, the National Guard seized the strike headquarters and placed all the leaders into a corral at the state fairgrounds.

But even though the declaration of martial law and the weakened financial strength of the union placed the strike in extreme jeopardy, the Teamsters managed to win. 35,000 members of the building trade unions walked out in solidarity. Public opinion turned harsh against the mayor and police chief of Minneapolis with widespread calls for impeaching both. The strikers stated repeatedly that they would not return to their jobs without an agreement. On August 21, the employers submitted a proposal to a federal mediator that incorporated most of the union’s demands and the strike ended. The strike gave the union great power in the city and destroyed the Citizens Alliance, which disbanded in 1936.

That wasn’t the whole story though. The international hated Local 544 for its communist leadership and radical ways. In March 1935, Teamsters’ President Daniel Tobin expelled Local 544 from the IBT, though he was forced to let them back in a year later. This was all somewhat ironic because it was the actions of Local 544 that did more than any other thing to make the IBT a truly national union and a labor powerhouse. The employers eventually got their revenge against the radicals though. In 1941, 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers’ Party (which the Communist League of America had become), including some members of the strike leadership, were sentenced to federal prison for violating the Smith Act of 1940, the first people prosecuted under its unconstitutional provisions.

Over at marxists.org, there is an excellent repository of primary source material about the strike, which I recommend reading when you have time.

This series has also covered the Triangle Fire of 1911 and the murder of Frank Steunenberg in 1905.

Shortly after 1 o’clock this morning, the Virginia House of Delegates proved that it can indeed be as mean-spirited and parochial as its detractors at Comedy Central have come to expect. By a slim margin, the House voted to kill the judicial nomination of an openly gay Richmond prosecutor who had bipartisan support going into the vote. A last-minute lobbying effort by the very same social conservatives who pushed unsuccessfully to mandate “medically unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasounds” this past spring, successfully killed Tracy Thorne-Begland’s bid for a judgeship, based on claims that his 20 years of “activism” on gay rights issues made him unfit to sit on the bench.

Thorne-Begland won only 33 votes of the 51 he needed to win the judgeship. Thirty-one delegates voted against him, and many abstained. He was the only candidate voted down. The only issues on which Thorne-Begland was challenged were his same-sex partner and his gay rights activism. There wasn’t even a claim that he was unfit for any reason other than who he is and what he has fought for.

Next: the legislature will vote to make “Massive Resistance” the state motto.

And the center not only did not hold, it couldn’t seem to get any attention whatsoever. Americans Elect, a lavishly funded “centrist” group that was supposed to provide an alternative to traditional political parties, has been a ridiculous flop. Basically, about seven people were actually excited about the venture — all of them political pundits. Actual voters couldn’t care less.

[...]

So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on.

Americans Elect was created to appeal to this class of professional centrists — which meant that it was doomed to go nowhere.

But without a third party, who will sit Jim DeMint and Sherrod Brown down and tell them to cut the bullshit?

Kilgore:

Assuming AE is unlikely to just call the whole thing off, I’d suggest they cut to the chase and nominate their most prominent backer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, as the nominee. Under AE’s elaborate rules, he’d presumably have to disclose a party affiliation and then choose a running-mate from a different party. But he could certainly self-identify as a member of the Friedman Party, and then choose a running-mate from the Party of Richard Cohen or the Party of Robert Samuelson or the Party of David Brooks. It would be a Very Serious Ticket.

I dunno, I can’t see a movement taking off without a true electoral powerhouse like Erskine Bowles.

And while you’d like to think that nobody paid to write about politics for a living could possibly have taken thus seriously, you’d be wrong.

I have a piece in Salon on the law school side of the student debt fiasco.

I had a request in comments to discuss how new historical findings have complicated the traditional story about FDR’s Court-packing plan and the “Switch in Time That Saved Nine.” Since this also gives me a chance to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while — discuss and fulsomely praise Jeff Shesol’s recent book Supreme Power — I thought I’d take the request.

As most of you know, as the culmination of a long, if erratic, series of reactionary opinions by holdovers from the McKinleynomics regime on the Supreme Court, in 1936 the Supreme Court two issued widely and justifiably ridiculed opinions 1)striking down New York’s minimum wage law based on an implied “liberty of contract” that envisioned impoverished workers and their employers as being on equal footing as bargaining partners and 2)holding that a coal mining concern that sent more than 95% of its product out of state was not engaged in interstate commerce and hence its labor relations were beyond the reach of the federal government. In 1937, the Court reversed itself, upholding a state minimum wage law and the National Labor Relations Act in cases that, for all intents and purposes, rested on facts that were materially indistinguishable from the 1936 cases. Since the key intervening event was FDR’s proposal of a Court-packing plan , the classic civics textbook history is that while the plan stalled in the Senate it fundamentally succeeded by causing the Court to back down.

However, historical evidence complicates this claim. We know, thanks to the work of Bruce Ackerman and other historians, that swing vote Owen Roberts had already voted in conference to sustain the Washington minimum wage law three months before the Court packing plan was announced. And he shifted his vote although, as Shesol shows, FDR went out of his way not to make the Court a campaign issue in 1936 although he had been highly critical in the past. (Chief Justice Huges also switched of half-switched his vote in some case, although he was never a decisive vote in these cases and apparently he was being largely strategic when he joined Roberts and the Four Horsemen.) The Court did hear oral arguments in Laughlin Steel right after the announcement of the plan, so it’s possible that the pressure affected Roberts’s vote in that case, although since he had already switched once it’s hard to say.

So if it wasn’t the Court-packing plan, or at least just the Court-packing plan, what was it? Roberts always maintained that he was perfectly consistent, but essentially nobody believes him.  Not only are the votes transparently inconsistent, but as Shesol points out Roberts’s rationale directly contradicts the facts. Roberts says that he voted against the New York minimum wage bill in Tipaldo because New York refused to ask for Adkins to be overruled, but since Washington explicitly asked for the controlling precedent to be reconsidered he switched his vote in Parrish. But, actually, the reverse is true: New York, while arguing that its carefully drafted bill could be distinguished, also asked for Adkins to be overruled while Washington didn’t. So Roberts certainly did change his mind for reasons that had nothing to do with case facts.

If it wasn’t the Court-packing plan directly, I certainly don’t doubt that political pressure of various kinds affected Roberts. Roberts was a Republican corporate lawyer who also liked to think of himself as enlightened and moderate, and he also had presidential aspirations that his 1936 Supreme Court votes permanently ended. He had authored a key opinion undermining the “liberty of contract” doctrine before rejoining the reactionary faction of the Court. So it’s likely that the reaction against the extremist 1936 opinions affected him. As Shesol demonstrates, the reaction to Tipaldo in particular was fierce and bipartisan — “out of the 344 editorials…only 10 supported it.” The vain and insecure Roberts may have also been affected by a Stone dissent in another 1936 case that was unusually cutting for the era and completely shredded Robert’s opinion. (One of the many thing Supreme Power documents well is the extent to which the cavalcade of reactionary nonsense pushed Stone to the end of his rope. After one particularly silly Sutherland opinion gutting the SEC’s investigatory powers, Stone wrote Felix Frankfurter that the opinion “was written for morons…When our Court sets at naught a plain command of Congress, without the invocation of any identifiable prohibition of the Constitution, and supports it only by platitudinous irrelevancies, it is a matter of transcendent importance.”   Alas, the quality of conservative jurisprudence hasn’t necessarily improved much.)

So while the Court-packing plan itself may not have influenced Roberts, political pressure more generally (including FDR’s previous willingness to play constitutional hardball) almost certainly did. And the 1936 opinions were so extreme and untenable — collectively producing a situation in which neither level of government had the ability to pass fundamental regulations, based on strained or entirely judicially invented readings of the Constitution — that it was a matter of time in any case.