Ed already covered the Harris v. Quinn arguments concerning forced unionization making their way through the Supreme Court, but here’s a quick food-for-thought addendum: As George Will points out, union participation has been dropping precipitously for decades, and they depend upon concentrated government support to keep their blue model going. If the Supreme Court were to rule against Labor in this case — a scenario that Krauthammer admits he thinks is unlikely — “they know it’s the power of the state that keeps them going, and in the absence of it, they really are looking at ruin.”

Krauthammer: I think this would be a blow to organized labor from which they would not recover. Unless you force people into these unions, they generally don’t go. As we saw in Wisconsin, as we saw in Indiana, once you release government workers from the obligation to actually pay into a union — in Indiana, for example, the government stopped collecting dues on behalf of the union. Membership collapsed by 80, 90 percent. … I would guess the Supreme Court is not going to overturn this. It is really quite loathe to overturning longstanding arrangements. … There are ways in which it could rule in a less radical way. For example, it could say that these workers don’t have to be deemed state workers which would be slightly different from saying you’re a state worker, you now have to pay into a union. So I suspect they are going to look for a way to be less sweeping in their ruling.