But is it unconstitutional?
In the March 30 Wall Street Journal, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey make the case in an op-ed titled “Why Card Check Is Unconstitutional.”
The entire piece warrants reading. But two points are worth noting here:
• The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, along with the Fifth and 14th Amendment due process clauses, to protect a variety of expressive and associational rights. The right to speak and associate anonymously is among those rights. Indeed, anonymous speech has a long and honored tradition in American politics. Much of the political agitation leading up to the American Revolution was necessarily anonymous in order to avoid British sedition charges. And three of the Constitution's Framers -- James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay -- wrote the Federalist Papers supporting its ratification under the anonymous pen name "Publius."
• There can be little doubt that the act of voting on important issues is a form of symbolic speech, residing at the very core of the interests protected by the Constitution. The secret ballot has not only been adopted in federal and state elections, it is recognized as a fundamental human right in a number of international instruments. This includes the U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, that requires secret ballot voting as "guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors."
The card check bill clearly would be bad economics, grossly unfair to workers, punitive to businesses, and according to Rivkin and Casey, in violation of the Constitution.
Raymond J. Keating
Chief Economist
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
No comments:
Post a Comment