Category: reason

The First Church of Cannabis can’t legally use marijuana as a religious sacrament, according to a ruling last week from Indiana judge Sheryl Lynch.

Many in the First Church of Cannabis—a religious organization that sprang from the passage of Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)—expected a different outcome. Filing the lawsuit not long after the RFRA passed, church members argued that the state’s RFRA should extend the right for them to bypass laws prohibiting marijuana use as some Native American religious groups have been permitted to do.

Nonetheless, many outside the church assumed this lawsuit was stretching the boundaries too far.

“I’m pretty sure the governor of Indiana did not intend to inspire a national freakout when he signed this bill,” wrote Reason’s Jesse Walker in a 2015 article on the suit. “So in that sense, the law has had unintended consequences. But accidentally creating an easy legal loophole for Hoosier hemp aficionados is not one of them.”

Lynch, of Indiana’s Marion County Superior Court, defended her decision by suggesting “it would be impossible to combat illicit drug use and trade in piecemeal fashion that allowed for a religious exception that would become ripe for abuse.”

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill applauded the ruling, saying he “appreciate[s] the court’s fidelity to both the law and to common sense.”

“Indiana’s laws against the possession, sale and use of marijuana protect the health, safety and well-being of Hoosiers statewide,” Hill’s statement continued. “When the state has justifiable and compelling interests at stake, no one can evade the law simply by describing their illegal conduct as an exercise of religious faith.”

Bill Levin, a Reform Jew who founded the First Church of Cannabis, expressed plans to appeal the ruling to a higher court.

Levin and his fellow church members aren’t the first religious organizations to try to seek the aid of governments to legitimize drug usage. After all, the Clinton-era federal RFRA was written to ensure that peyote was still available for use in Native American ceremonies. This congregation won’t be the first or the last. Jacob Sullum’s 2007 piece in Reason provides in further insight to this unique area of the law where drugs and faith go hand in hand.

Unmasking GOP hypocrisy and hysteria. Legislation introduced by three Republican representatives would make it a federal crime to engage in political protest while wearing a mask. Just in case there was any confusion that this is a bill explicitly targeting their political opponents while trashing the Constitution, it’s called the Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018.

Technically, the bill makes it a crime—punishable by up to 15 years in prison, plus a fine—to “injure, oppress, threat[en], or intimidate any person” while “in disguise, including while wearing a mask,” even if the conduct in question would be legal when undertaken by a non-masked person. The bill specifically notes that it applies “whether or not [a masked person is] acting under color of law,” and it does not define “oppress” or “intimidate.”

So under the Unmasking Antifa Act, all sorts of acts of legal protest could be considered criminal if someone—be they with Antifa, the NRA, the KKK, or the saving kittens drive—throws on a tutu, tiara, fake mustache, mask, bandanna, or any other sort of costume element.

The bill also creates a statutory enhancement (and a mandatory minimum) for certain acts of vandalism committed while wearing a mask. Anyone found guilty of “destroying property within special maritime and territorial jurisdiction” will automatically be sentenced to two years in prison, in addition to any sentence otherwise imposed, if their act took place while wearing “a disguise, including a mask.”

The whole business reeks, of course—things should be criminalized based on the activity in question, not the attire one wears while accomplishing said activity. Republicans rightfully tend to stand against “hate speech” laws and other similar statutes that impose heavier criminal penalties based on subjective states of mind or elements ancillary to the crime. They also frown—or at least once upon a time did—at unnecessary federalization.

But hypocrisy is currency in Washington, so here we are: mandatory minimums for mask wearers, to be monitored by federal agents. Nothing dystopian in that, nosiree…

The bill is being pushed by Reps. Peter King (R-N.Y.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.).

FREE MARKETS

The NATO summit started today in Brussels, and President Trump has wasted no time before insulting U.S. allies and spouting crazy conspiracy theories. America’s allies are “delinquent” in covering defense costs, Trump told NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, and Germany is “captive to Russia.”

Meanwhile, back home, the Trump administration is threatening to levy another $200 billion in tariffs on China.

FREE MINDS

Should a non-transgender actor take a role as a transgender character? Business Insider columnist Daniella Greenbaum doesn’t see why not, and made her case in a recent column titled “Scarlett Johansson is being unfairly criticized for doing her job after being cast as a transgender man.” Despite being labeled a “conservative” argument, Greenbaum’s piece merely suggested that “the job of an actor is to represent someone else” and therefore their actual gender identities off-screen are “irrelevant” to the roles they play onscreen.

But the article caused an uproar, and Business Insider simply removed it from the publication’s website. The page now says that the article has been removed for not meeting the site’s “editorial standards”—standards that apparently don’t include standing by work they publish if it pisses off certain orthodoxies.

If you are a journalist, this should worry you unless Business Insider can explain a bit more clearly exactly what happened here. Doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with the column. Retracting a piece entirely should be an absolute last resort.https://t.co/L7szGzcSYv

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 10, 2018

“Editors should make sure we are not publishing shallow, ‘hot takes,’ but instead, fully thought-out arguments that reflect and respect the opposing view,” global editor-in-chief Nich Carlson told staff in an internal email obtained by The Daily Beast. “There should be no partisan name-calling, e.g. ‘social justice warriors,’ ‘libtards,’ or ‘rednecks.’ Opinion and arguments should feel reported and researched, and not like quick reactions.”

FREE MOVEMENT

Judges gives ICE more—and less—time to reunite families.

One federal judge extends the deadline for the Trump admin to reunite separated migrant families while another rebukes their attempt to indefinitely detain them.

What does this mean for families not yet reunited?@Peter_Wehner @BretStephensNYT @MattWelchhttps://t.co/ib4fKSE88z

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) July 10, 2018

QUICK HITS

• Dwight and Steve Hammond, the Oregon ranches convicted of arson, have been pardoned.

Amazing work by @CityLab & @Tanvim mapping all the contracts that local governments have with ICE. It’s typically elected local officials who decide these, & “there are several diverse, Dem-leaning counties signed up to jail large numbers of immigrants”. https://t.co/Z4QaRzPnEB

— Taniel (@Taniel) July 10, 2018

• Republican proposals for extenging paid family leave policies are gaining momentum.

BREAKING: @realDonaldTrump @WhiteHouse releases Executive Order to end competitive selection process for Administrative Law Judges, making them political appointees who can be fired at will.

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 10, 2018

• The “Intellectual Dark Web” crew would like you to know that “toxic masculinity” is just cultural-Marxist mumbo-jumbo but women wearing makeup is “toxic femininity” and a real threat.

Indianapolis cop says SESTA/FOSTA closure of Backpage has ‘blinded’ investigators making it impossible to find victims it was suppose to help. Meanwhile, those who are being victimized are pushed further into the shadows & are not calling police. https://t.co/Cxlhr5TFsz #sexwork

— PACE Society (@PaceSociety) July 10, 2018

• “We let someone get naked and have every other part of their body touched and rubbed by a massage therapist. Hell, we let proctologists spend their day fingering men and sticking things up their anus. So if someone wants to yank a guy’s crank, I say let ’em.” Here, here!
• Yale law students warn that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a potential Supreme Court justice “presents an emergency.”

Trump is ruthlessly preventing immigrants from coming to America to protect “U.S. jobs” from the minute he stepped into the Oval Office. But now he is also threatening companies such as iconic American motorcycle manufacturer, Harley Davidson, because it wants to move operations abroad to escape his trade war.

But Trump alone is not to blame for this. Attacking fleeing Americans as “unpatriotic” has long been a Democratic tradition, actually, points out Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

View this article.

Upon being nominated to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh said he had “witnessed firsthand” Donald Trump’s “appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary.” That claim raised some eyebrows, given the president’s tendency to question the authority of judges who reach conclusions he does not like.

Kavanaugh, by contrast, clearly understands the importance of an independent judiciary as a check on the other branches of government. His readiness to perform that function as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is reassuring, Jacob Sullum says, especially since the man who picked him for the Supreme Court seems to know little and care less about the legal principles that protect liberty and thwart tyranny.

View this article

Officials in Burlington, Iowa, have agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a woman shot to death by police Officer Jesse Hill in front of her toddler. But the city is refusing to release body camera footage of the shooting. The officer claims he accidentally shot the woman while trying to shoot an aggressive dog. An attorney for the family who has seen the video says it does not support the officer’s claims.

The Justice Department has reached a settlement with the Second Amendment Foundation and Defense Distributed, a collective that organizes, promotes, and distributes technologies to help home gun-makers. Under the agreement, which resolved a suit filed by the two groups in 2015, Americans may “access, discuss, use, reproduce or otherwise benefit from the technical data” that the government had previously ordered Defense Distributed to cease distributing.

Before this, the feds had insisted that Defense Distributed’s gun-making files violate the munitions export rules embedded in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Defense Distributed’s suit claimed that this was was “censorship of Plaintiffs’ speech,” since the files in question consist of computer code and thus counted as expression. It also argued that “the ad hoc, informal and arbitrary manner in which that scheme is applied, violate the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments.” (The Second because the information in the computer files implicates weapons possession rights.)

In what is a very unusual move in ITAR actions, the government will pay more than $39,000 of the plaintiffs’ legal and administrative fees. Cody Wilson, chieftain of Defense Distributed, tells Wired that this is only about 10 percent of what they’ve spent.

That Wired story is mostly devoted to scaring the reader about what a world in which people are freer to use computer files to make weapons at home might mean. Wilson is open that as far as he’s concerned, he’s killed the cause of gun control by popularizing the home construction of weapons via computer instructions.

Wired also speculates that the settlement is some sign of a Trump administration bending over backwards to satisfy a Second Amendment constituency. Alan Gura, one of the lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side—and the attorney who won both 2008’s Heller case and 2010’s McDonald, two major Supreme Court victories for gun rights—disagrees, noting the administration’s record in other ongoing Second Amendment cases.

“This administration maintained the Obama DOJ’s cert petition in Binderup (denied 7-2), and has consistently opposed all other as-applied Second Amendment challenges, including Kanter (they won, Kanter appealed), Hatfield (they lost and just appealed), Medina (they won and Medina, repped by me on appeal, appealed, argument 9/11), and Reyes (being litigated now…),” Gura says in an email today. “They have also continued defending the appeal in Mance [regarding gun purchases across state lines]—they had over a year to change their mind, see the light, and admit that the district court was right, but they stuck to their appeal which unfortunately they won, and are defending against the currently-pending en banc petition. There are other cases they defend, some of course less meritorious, but any notion that Trump is pro-gun and having DOJ roll over would be fantasy.”

The more likely factor behind the settlement, Gura believes, is that the government “realized that not a single 5th Circuit judge offered that they were likely to succeed on the merits. To the contrary, the centerpiece of their victory was that they could somehow avoid the merits. When they could avoid the merits no longer, suddenly the national security threat faded away.”

In a press release, the Second Amendment Foundation notes its favorite aspect of the settlement:

Significantly, the government expressly acknowledges that non-automatic firearms up to .50-caliber—including modern semi-auto sporting rifles such as the popular AR-15 and similar firearms—are not inherently military.

“Not only is this a First Amendment victory for free speech, it also is a devastating blow to the gun prohibition lobby,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “For years, anti-gunners have contended that modern semi-automatic sport-utility rifles are so-called ‘weapons of war,’ and with this settlement, the government has acknowledged they are nothing of the sort.

“Under this settlement,” he continued, “the government will draft and pursue regulatory amendments that eliminate ITAR control over the technical information at the center of this case. They will transfer export jurisdiction to the Commerce Department, which does not impose prior restraint on public speech. That will allow Defense Distributed and SAF to publish information about 3-D technology.”

Since this is a settlement and not a victory on the merits in court, the government is still officially insisting their actions did not violate any rights. But an optimistic Gura thinks the “courts might remember this episode the next time the government offers up a spurious national security claim.”

The government says the removal of these legal restrictions will be announced by July 27 on the Director of Defense Trade Controls’ website. In return for that action the plaintiffs agree to drop the lawsuit.

A ReasonTV interview with Wilson from February:

The Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution to protect Americans from facing unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Yet according to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment suffers no violation when the federal government engages in the wholesale warrantless collection of every Americans’ telephone record metadata.

Kavanaugh expressed that view in the course of a 2015 statement concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc in Klayman v. Obama, which was then before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case centered on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s controversial information-gathering program, which involved the NSA collecting the telephony metadata of all Americans. “In my view,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the Government’s metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.”

Kavanugh offered two principal explanations for why he considered the program to be constitutional. First, he invoked what’s known as the “third-party doctrine,” which says that if you voluntarily share private information with a third party, you no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. “The Government’s collection of telephony metadata from a third party such as a telecommunications service provider is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote.

But “even if the bulk collection of telephony metadata constitutes a search,” Kavanaugh continued, turning to his second justification, the program may still be approved because the Fourth Amendment “bars only unreasonable searches and seizures. And the Government’s metadata collection program,” he wrote, “readily counts as reasonable” because it “serves a critically important special need—preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.” He added: “In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”

My colleague Jacob Sullum recently observed that while Kavanaugh has been “receptive to cases that challenge gun control laws on Second Amendment grounds,” he “seems to take a narrower view of the Fourth Amendment.” Kavanaugh’s endorsement of warrantless bulk data collection by the U.S. government would seem to reinforce that observation.

The future of the Fourth Amendment is one of the most pressing issues facing the Supreme Court. As the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee prepare for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in the coming months, I encourage them to devote real attention to his possible shortcomings on the Fourth Amendment front.

I’m at the downtown D.C. strip club where Stormy Daniels will soon perform, and everyone keeps congratulating me on my recent wedding. This is because the bulk of the early crowd here seems comprised of political reporters.

Daniels is scheduled to perform two more shows here on Tuesday night. While her previous performances were booked under the banner “Make America Horny Again,” these D.C. shows are billed as “All Things Revealed”—an innovation, The Washingtonian reports, meant to reflect the venue’s upscale vibe. But anyone who was hoping for something more than a standard striptease would be disappointed. Daniels three-song act is energetic, sexy, and fun, but also brief and devoid of any overt political content.

The rest of the three-and-a-half-hour affair is basically Cloakroom business-as-usual, save for the cadre of barstools taken up by people scribbling in notebooks and checking their phones for news about Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

“I keep trying to ask people why they’re here,” one of the them tells me toward the evening’s start, “but everyone I approach ends up being a journalist.”

It’s only a slight exaggeration. Several groups of non-press guests dot the booths that flank the stage here at Cloakroom—an adult entertainment venue notable for the time the ground literally opened up and swallowed it whole, back in 2014. But it’ll be at least another hour before the club starts to feel less like an especially awkward press conference.

I showed up around 6:30 to catch the first show, then spent the next hour drinking beer at the bar and watching the club’s regular dancers do their sets. One or two at a time they take the stage, equipped with two poles that stretch about 20 feet in the air. One woman shimmies to the very top, writhes around gracefully, then slides swiftly back down, straight into the splits. Polite clapping reverberates.

Cloakroom has added a few special touches for tonight, including $3,500 VIP balcony boxes (at least a couple seem full by the end of the show) and women walking around in elaborate body paint. One of them is covered in words, including Stormy, Trump, love, and hate, but the rest of the paint jobs are apolitical. They do periodic laps around the room and then settle into a booth back by the restrooms.

I step outside a little before eight, just in time to see Daniels exiting a car with her entourage, wearing a striped sundress, her hair still undone. A handful of camera operators and reporters who had been laying in wait descend but no avail: Stormy slips into the club without so much as a word. I go across the street to get a cheeseburger.

When I return, the place has finally started to fill up. It’s mostly an older crowd. Everyone talks in subdued tones. The music is played at a very reasonable level. There’s a man dressed in some sort of flamboyant ’70s movie-pimp clothes and there’s the odd handlebar mustache, but overall the spectator vibe is very office-park brewery—a sea of middle-aged dads and indeterminate-age women in jewel-toned sheath dresses. A lot of people look a little uncomfortable.

When a young woman in a prissy pink skirt flounces in on the arm of a man with hip glasses, reporters click open their pens. “We must be very interesting,” the woman—a little slurry, a little disdainful—tells me after the show. “Everyone wanted to talk to us.” But they are not very interesting. They are simply the recipients of everyone’s last grasping for reportorial “color.”

A little before nine, an announcer tells us that it’s “about to get Storrrrmmmmy.” People rush to take their seats or get a spot by the stage. “Hey, Big Spender” starts to play and Daniels sashays out from the back in a shimmery pink number that recalls Marilyn Monroe’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes attire. She does a lap around the place first, making people’s acquaintance—Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer was among those who were grabbed and welcomed to her bosom—and vamping it up. At a front-row table where a nice man has offered me a seat, Daniels presses his head to her chest and then pushes it back, propping up her leg and holding up her garter. He is fumbling to find his money, and I so beat him to it, slipping a few dollars into her garter belt first. She plays it up, giving the man disapproving look until he gleefully flings a fistful of dollars at her.

The confidence and likability Daniels has displayed in recent interviews—most notably on 60 Minutes in March—are on full display as she works the room and the stage. The theatrical element is her performance’s strong suit. There are no mystical feats of pole-trick daring in Daniels’ set, nothing too complicated, XXX-rated, or extraordinary in her moves.

But she fucking sells it. She has the sort of showmanship that makes it look like she’s having a ball, and a style more vintage va-va-voom than vulgar.

The crowd responds to Daniels’ energy in kind. Song two is a “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”/”Material Girl” medley. Everyone is on their feet, flanking the stage, shouting, throwing dollar bills. Daniels flings one of her gloves to the audience. During the set, a man with a big janitor-style broom sweeps the money across the stage into a big laundry bin to clear a path for her to dance. More clothes come off. The music switches to something slow and sultry.

And then it is over. Daniels exits. The man with the broom keeps pushing money off the stage. People begin heading for the door.

The young woman with the amazing pole skills comes back on just as it’s announced that Daniels will be posing for pictures in the hall. That leaves the room practically empty as she shimmies to the tippy top of the pole again, spins around, lands in the splits. I leave all the cash I have left on the stage for her, exiting the club to the sounds of folks jostling for Daniels’ attention, autographs, answers.

Outside, a few reporters are still lurking, hoping to catch another glimpse of Daniels, murmuring about Brett Kavanaugh…

You don’t have a constitutional right to a cash bail if courts use other methods to monitor and release defendants before their trials.

So ruled a federal appeals court Monday in a challenge to New Jersey’s recent bail reforms. The lawsuit was filed by a defendant charged with assault last year—and was supported by an insurance firm that underwrites bail bonds.

New Jersey has almost completely stopped using cash bail—where defendants have to front money, typically through a bail bondsman—to determine who is released and who remains in pretrial jail detention. Instead, New Jersey courts use an extensive pretrial assessment system that calculates a defendant’s public safety risks, drawing on his or her past conduct and on the nature of the charges. The court can then establish terms of monitoring for release, requiring defendants to check in with the courts on a regular basis and to accept an assortment of nonfinancial conditions for freedom. If the courts believe that someone presents an unsurmountable public safety risk, a judge can order the defendant to be jailed until trial. But money is no longer a consideration.

This has resulted in a 20 percent drop in pretrial detention. It has also, unsurprisingly, decimated the Garden State’s bail bonds industry.

The person who filed the suit, Brittan Holland, got into a bar fight and was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. The prosecutor and the court’s assessment system recommended that he be detained in jail due to the severity of the offence and his previous assault conviction. But after negotiations, everybody agreed to home detention and electronic monitoring instead.

Holland—supported by Lexington National Insurance Corp., a bail bond underwriting firm—then sued to stop New Jersey’s bail changes. He argues that denying him the possibility of cash bail violated his Eighth Amendment right prohibiting excessive bail and his Fourth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third District rejected these arguments. The three-judge panel ruled that the insurance company lacked standing to challenge the law. Holland can, but the court determined that there’s no constitutional “right” to use money or a surety bond as a condition for pretrial release, and they don’t think his challenge is likely to succeed.

To be clear, they’re not saying that people don’t have a constitutional right to seek pretrial release. Rather, the court ruled that there’s nothing in the history of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence that requires that cash bail must be one of the mechanisms available to make sure people show up for their trials. It noted, in fact, that the development and expansion of cash bail in the United States over the past century has frequently accomplished the opposite of facilitating pretrial release:

Monetary bail often deprived presumptively innocent defendants of their pretrial liberty, a result that surely cannot be fundamental to preserving ordered liberty.

As a result, we hold cash bail and corporate surety bond are not protected by substantive due process because they are neither sufficiently rooted historically nor implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.

And those Fourth Amendment claims? Holland argued that demanding electronic monitoring in exchange for his freedom was overly intrusive on his privacy when compared to shelling out money to a bail bondsman to make sure he showed up for trial. The court replied that monitoring criminal defendants doesn’t need to be the least intrusive choice, merely a reasonable one.

The ruling is a victory for bail reformers looking to spread New Jersey’s system to other states. It’s important to note, though, that the court favored the reforms pretty much because they are working. They mean fewer people are being detained simply because they’re poor. And the defendant in this case wasn’t even somebody who was being held in jail. Other communities attempting to follow in New Jersey’s footsteps are sometimes seeing different results. In Maryland, unfortunately, they’re getting more pretrial detention.

Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, released a statement disagreeing with the decision while acknowledging that maybe Holland wasn’t the best defendant to challenge the law. Clayton said Holland’s team will soon decide whether to push the case forward to trial or to try to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For more information about both the bail reform movement and how New Jersey’s courts work under the new system, check out my Reason cover story in the August/September issue, hitting newsstands right now.

Public sector unions could lose millions of dollars because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME last month, since they’ll no longer be able to compel non-members to pay dues. But a state lawmaker in New York has proposed what he calls a “workaround” to let unions continue cashing in even if they lose members.

The solution? Redirecting funds that could be used to give workers raises into the unions’ own accounts.

Rep. Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan) plans to introduce legislation that would allow unions to include the costs of collective bargaining in their government contracts, the New York Post reports. That would tap taxpayers, rather than union members, to fund unions’ operations.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of logic to the Janus decision to start with, but New York state—in our Constitution and law—has long recognized that public employees have the right to collectively bargain,” Gottfried tells the paper.

Of course, nothing in the Janus ruling prohibits public sector employees from bargaining collectively. The ruling merely says that unions cannot compel dues payment from non-members covered by collective bargaining agreements. Those mandatory dues payments—also known as “agency fees”—violate workers’ First Amendment rights, the Supreme Court ruled.

“Public employees are forced to subsi­dize a union, even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bar­gaining and related activities,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmem­bers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

Post-Janus, union will have to convince their members that it is worth paying monthly dues to support the unions’ activities.

Gottfried’s proposal seems to put the interests of the union itself ahead of the interest of its members. His bill would redirect funds that could otherwise go to workers’ paychecks to cover the unions’ operating expenses. In a memo to colleagues in the state General Assembly, Gottfried says the bill would let public employers agree to “direct reimbursement” of the unions’ bargaining costs as part of contract negotiations.

“The collectively bargained amount would then proportionally reduce the workers’ salary,” Gottfried wrote.

In effect, workers would instead get the leftovers after the union got paid first.

But it’s unlikely that any worker would actually experience a pay cut under Gottfried’s scheme, says Ken Girardin, policy analyst at the Empire Center, an Albany-based think tank.

Public sector unions have a monopoly on representation, so including the cost of contract negotiation in the contracts they sign means taxpayers would end up paying more without any reasonable hope that governments could choose a less expensive option.

“A percentage of future raises would be designated as collective bargaining expenses and permanently embedded in base salaries on a recurring, permanent basis,” Girardin writes.

In other words, taxpayers will pick up the tab for unions’ political activities.

To comply with the Janus decision, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli announced last week that agency fees will no longer be withheld from workers’ paychecks starting on July 11. According to data from the Empire Center, there are about 200,000 public sector workers in New York who are not union members. They will save about $110 million annually by not having to pay the fees.

That could be just the start. An analysis by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed think tank, estimated that 726,000 workers, including some 136,000 members in New York, would choose to stop paying dues if the Janus decision went against the unions.

“Janus put public sector unions at a crossroads. They could embrace a voluntary system or they could double-down on coercion,” says Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The New York proposal, he tells Reason, would “allow union officials to sell out workers to line their own pockets.”

Elsewhere, unions are looking for other ways to keep the revenue flowing in the post-Janus world. In Hawaii, one unnamed worker tells Hawaii Public Radio that when he tried to opt out of mandatory dues payments he was told he would have to wait until it was time to renew his annual membership in the state’s largest public sector union.

“There’s not an 11-month waiting period for the First Amendment to kick in,” says Semmens.