Also, how does Rand Paul get away with calling himself the liberty candidate when he supports unconstitutional "right-to-work" laws?
I'm sorry, but you don't get to just throw around "unconstitutional" at any law you don't like. Right to Work laws exist in plenty of states, and the one that was struck down in Indiana was struck down based on a provision in Indiana's Constitution, not the U.S. Constitution.
Doesn't the Constitution forbid impairment of contracts?
Uh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_ClauseSo, yeah, an outright ban on unions wouldn't pass muster, but right-to-work laws, from my understanding, generally don't ban unions, and just prohibit making joining one (and/or paying its dues) a condition of employment. The intention of the law is to preserve the worker's right to choose where they create a contract of employment - in direct negotiation with the employer or through the "middle man" (union). So it doesn't act as a true prohibition on making a contract about anything. Yeah, you could argue that allowing employees to refuse to pay union dues impacts the union's ability to exist for other workers, or that sometimes workers not part of the union still receive benefits that were gained by the union, but there are obvious counterarguments of 1) people who don't want to be part of a union are usually those who don't need its benefits (i.e. seasonal employees, college students still on parents' insurance, and etc.), so the union really shouldn't need to collect funds from them anyways, 2) that it forces people to buy a 'service' that is not directly needed for doing the actual job they were hired to do, and 3) that the contract clause itself was intended to ensure paying of debts, not anything to do with any sort of work.
So, yeah, succeeding here would be a huge use of the crap "constitution is a living document" argument. And even if you got that to work, there's still the fact that this clause definitely doesn't inhibit the
federal government from passing such a law, which the next republican administration will probably do anyways. (I have little confidence that they'll keep the filibuster around very long, and some centrist democrats might be willing to vote for it in any case.)
