There’s been much talk about the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned a lot of campaign-finance “reform.” Last night, for example, President Obama appeared to look straight at the justices as he rebuked the Court for this holding. Most of the commentary to date has dealt with its implications for Wall Street, big oil companies, the auto industry, and the major unions. Turns out, however, that there may be big implications for education, too, because, when it comes to political spending, the two teacher unions (including their state and local affiliates) have, in recent years, outspent all the major corporate interests combined.
To refresh your memory, the Court majority sided with Citizens United, a non-profit that produced “Hillary: The Movie,” an anti-Clinton exposé released during the 2008 primary season. Two issues were addressed: how the movie was funded and the timing of its release. To handle the former, the Court overturned a twenty-year-old decision restricting corporate and labor outlays (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 1990) that distinguished between “corporate” and “human” speakers as legitimate sources of political speech. Corporations represent interests bigger than just the sum of its shareholders or senior executives, thus making their “speech” unduly influential. It specifically dealt with state-level campaigns. For the latter, it struck down part of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (a.k.a. “McCain-Feingold”), which banned corporate and union-funded “electioneering communication,” including “soft” money donations, during the last thirty days of federal election campaigns (including primaries), and which the Court had been upheld in 2003 in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission.
No more. As Justice Kennedy explains for the Citizens majority, “There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers....The government may regulate corporate speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether.”
Until last week, when the AFT supported a particular candidate, it had to solicit support behind “member-only” firewalls or in direct-member communications. (This particular strategy was also part of Citizens, where the appellant argued that it could advertise on TV for its video because it was available only on pay-per-view.) It also meant that the NEA and AFT had to use a political action committee to donate to federal campaigns, rather than giving to them directly, and could not do so in the prime thirty-day election lead-up period.
Having to work indirectly didn’t deter the teacher unions from collecting and contributing enormous sums. To wit, the NEA was the biggest political spender in the U.S. in 2007-08--a whopping $56 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It outspent the next biggest contributor (the Pechanga Band of Mission Indians) by more than $12 million, and that calculation doesn’t include the contributions made in concert with the AFT, which were catalogued under a separate NEA-AFT designation. The AFT clocked in at number twenty-five with a 2007-08 outlay of nearly $13.8 million. These figures include PAC, individual, and “soft” donations from parent and affiliate unions and their members to state and federal candidates, as reported to the Federal Election Commission.
But now that PACs are no longer needed, it’s not immediately clear if more union dollars will pad federal campaign pockets. It’s true that out of that 2007-08 $56 million, $53 million went to state campaigns or ballot initiatives, while only $3 million went federal. But this could be because there simply aren’t many Congressmen batting for education and that education is still mostly a state-level issue, rather than the McCain-Feingold restrictions. One thing is for sure, though. There’s a ton more federal money heading education’s way, which may or may not significantly shift the federal-state power balance and union-funding decisions accordingly.
It’s also interesting to note that unionized teachers as a share of overall public and private sector union membership is on the rise. Not only are there more unionized public sector employees, but more of them work in local government--police, firefighters, and, you guessed it, teachers. In fact, though union membership numbers declined from 2008 to 2009 by roughly 800,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual survey, most of that can be accounted for by private sector job losses. Public sector union members actually increased by 64,000 during that same time period and now number more than the private sector, despite the latter accounting for almost five times the number of jobs. This is important because it means that teachers and the teacher unions will have greater influence in how the labor movement as a whole lobbies for union-friendly policies. According to the Education Intelligence Agency, the teacher unions have largely shied away from being indentified with other unionized industries. This makes NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s comments at the AFL-CIO annual conference last September even more telling: in order to “change this country’s attitude toward unions…we need power…the ability to act, to influence, to make a difference. And that kind of power comes from unity.” The NEA might have three million or so members but the AFL-CIO represents more than eleven million workers. That’s a lot of votes.
The silver lining is that teacher unions have fallen out of favor, due in part to strong words from Obama and Duncan on the subject of union resistance to the administration’s favorite education reforms. So we probably won’t see any NEA-funded ads that close with “I’m Dennis Van Roekel and I endorse this message.” And we probably won’t see more money going to federal candidates. But we may see teachers’ unions turn up the volume of the state-level funding spigot and we’ll probably see them get even more involved in state and local reform battles.