From the left: Dems botching SCOTUS politics
Democrats still carping over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 “need to look in the mirror,” suggests Bloomberg’s Al Hunt. Their party “set the stage for their powerlessness to affect the court choice” by trying to block Neil Gorsuch, “and their reaction just deepens their political anguish.” Recall also that in 2013, Democrats “paved the way for McConnell’s gambit” by changing the rules to allow majority-vote confirmation of court choices. Now they’re “compounding their past miscalculations by making today’s fight almost exclusively about abortion,” hoping to persuade Maine Republican Susan Collins to vote no. But that’s “delusional,” says Hunt: She “will not be the 50th vote against a Trump nominee.”
Political scribe: New York’s unions face bleak future
The immediate repercussion of the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling that public-sector workers who don’t join a union can’t be forced to pay dues-like fees will be a blow to some unions’ finances. But Crain’s New York’s Greg David says “the real impact will play out over several years.” Private-sector unions may represent more New Yorkers, but “the real strength of organized labor here comes from the public sector, where a little less than 70 percent of employees belong to unions,” twice the national percentage. The key question: “whether the unions will lose members who joined only because they were going to have to pay dues whether they did or not.” The Manhattan Institute’s Daniel DiSalvo predicts union membership in New York will drop by 15…
