Court invalidates agency-fees requirement for public employees

The Supreme Court's decision in Janus is here.  In my view, while the stare decisis concerns about overruling Abood (which I have always thought was, to quote Justice Aliton, "poorly reasoned"), this result is the correct one, in that Abood and mandatory agency-fees had become outliers in the Court's First Amendment doctrine and precedents.  There will, of course, be a flood of commentary focusing on the political /partisan implications of the ruling, but I don't believe that commentary should obscure what I regard as the basic point that a public employee should not be required, as a condition of public employment, to support financially (and therefore, under the Court's precedents, to associate with) partisan and political activities to which he or she objects.  

I'll also note -- as I have many (Ed.:  Too many, Rick) times on this blog, that it is (with all due respect to the USCCB) mistaken to claim that Rerum Novarum, or the Church's social teaching on work and workers' rights more generally, requires or even counsels support for legal requirements that public employees support the partisan activities of today's public-employee unions. Nor is it "libertarian," or "individualistic," or "Randian," etc., to conclude that a Supreme Court charged with enforcing the First Amendment should invalidate such requirements.

Workers (in the public and in the private sectors) have a constitutional and moral right to form associations and to advocate in and through those associations for their interests. They do not, in my view, have either a constitutional or a moral right to enlist government power to require those who have different views about those interests to contribute to their partisan or inescapably political activities. (It is clear that the pre-Janus requirements that public-employee unions allow objecting workers to withhold funds for ideological activities are not strictly observed.)

I welcome others' reactions, of course!