What sort of questions have IRS agents been asking? Hot Air collated a top 10 list last week, noting that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ohio’s own Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Urbana) sent a letter to the IRS from the House Oversight Committee on March 27, 2012 detailing frequent complaints from right-of-center groups.

In many instances reported during the past week, organizations have shared IRS questionnaires containing multiple pages of detailed questions, often demanding years’ worth of information within a matter of weeks – and the IRS is not exactly a questioner for whom a best guess or approximation will do.

Here’s a brief look at five Ohio conservative organizations’ stories indicating politically-motivated targeting by IRS agents in the Cincinnati exemption determinations office.

1. “My wife and I were audited in 2011 for our 2010 tax return.  When the agent called she said the reason we were audited was ‘because of our association with the Cincinnati Tea Party’.  At the time my wife Nancy was the Treasurer for the CTP.  After the April 2010 Tax Day Rally we made a deposit into the Cincinnati Tea Party account that was in excess of $10,000 which means the bank was required to report the deposit to the IRS.  Since Nancy’s name was on the deposit slip, that allowed the IRS to connect her with the Cincinnati Tea Party.” – George Brunemann, Cincinnati Tea Party
2. “Please supply a chronology and complete description of all activities of your organization since the date of your formation on April 29, 2010, as well as those activities planned for the next 12 months.” – Ohio Christian Alliance received this IRS request on December 12, 2011 with a response deadline of December 30, 2011… after waiting nine months for the IRS to respond to its application
3. “Are you associated with any other IRC 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), or 527 organizations? If yes [...] Describe in detail the nature of the relationship(s) [...] Describe the nature of all contacts with the organizations [...]“ – Liberty Township Tea Party received this request amid a list of 35 questions and sub-questions, and was asked to submit the same information about its association with any for-profit groups; the Liberty Township Tea Party was also, as has been widely reported, asked to “provide details” of its relationship with Cincinnati Tea Party activist Justin Binik-Thomas
4. “Please explain in detail your organization’s involvement with the Tea Party.” – The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law received this demand and several others in May 2010
5. “Provide the following information for all the public events conducted or planned to be conducted by your organization: [...] The time, location, and content schedule of each event [...] copies of handouts [...] workshop materials that instructors will use [...] names and credentials of the instructors [...] If speeches or forums were or will be conducted at the event, provide detailed contents of the speeches or forums, names of the speakers and panels, and their credentials [...]“ – the Ohio Liberty Coalition (OLC) received this request and a number of other questions in January 2011, a year after applying for tax exemption

OLC leaders have been chronicling their back-and-forth with the IRS for years, and are encouraging liberty-minded groups with evidence of government intimidation to contact them.

Two days after Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) signaled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) Medicaid expansion would not be part of Ohio’s biennial budget, the Plain Dealer editors pretended a costly alternative floated a month earlier was a new plan “to overcome conservative griping.”

“The Ohio Plan” to spend even more taxpayer money expanding an ineffective entitlement program strongly resembles a Medicaid expansion plan Arkansas developed in concert with the scandal-ridden Obama White House.

In early April, Rep. Barbara Sears (R-Monclova Twp.) was still talking up the possibility of a “private option” approach to the PPACA Medicaid expansion. Many expected Rep. Sears to unveil some supposed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) compromise during budget deliberations, but she did not.

Of the Arkansas plan, Manhattan Institute health policy expert Avik Roy wrote, “if you were cynical, you could imagine that HHS is trying to make a display of showing flexibility now, because the agency knows that it can withdraw that flexibility later on, after the coverage expansion has been implemented, and states have relinquished their negotiating power.”

After the Ohio House passed its version of the biennial budget on April 18, Plain Dealer reporter Brandon Blackwell wrote that Medicaid expansion was “down, but not out,” inaccurately describing a Sears amendment preventing Medicaid expansion as a lifeline to Medicaid expansion.

The Medicaid amendment approved by the House and seemingly supported by the Senate calls for the legislature to develop a package of reforms seeking to “Lower net state and federal costs for the Medicaid program” and “Reduce the number of individuals who enroll in Medicaid over time.”

Any version of the PPACA Medicaid expansion would dramatically increase state costs, federal costs, and Medicaid enrollment – all of which are expressly forbidden by the language passed in the Ohio House.

Facts didn’t stop the Plain Dealer editors from calling the amendment “a compromise” between “Kasich loyalists” and House Republicans “skittish about primary election challenges from the right fringe of the GOP,” suggesting an amendment written to prevent Medicaid expansion will do the exact opposite.

Describing the PPACA Medicaid expansion – which would increase Ohio’s Medicaid spending by at least $500 million per year by 2021 – as “a win-win for Ohio,” the Plain Dealer editors added, “If Ohio refuses to expand Medicaid, Ohioans would be helping pay for medical care for the poor in other states — but not for poor Ohioans. That’s the absurd result Kasich is striving to avoid.”

All PPACA Medicaid expansion funding from DC will be new deficit spending from a federal government more than $16.7 trillion in debt. Increasing national deficits by billions per year while adding hundreds of millions per year to Ohio’s Medicaid costs is the absurd result the Plain Dealer ridicules conservatives for opposing.

“If working with private insurers and casting Medicaid expansion as Medicaid reform can get expansion done, there’s no reason why Ohio shouldn’t go that route,” the Plain Dealer editorial board concluded on April 26. “Anything would be better than the dead end that GOP intransigents want to map for needy Ohioans.”

While watching the following clip, keep in mind that OAPSE – an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – paid Rugola $253,351 in dues last year. Rugola’s comments began around the 1 minute mark, after Rep. Tracy Maxwell Heard (D-Columbus) lied that workplace freedom backers “want to eliminate collective bargaining.”

Rugola, Rep. Heard, and Rep. Debbie Phillips (D-Albany) all repeated a common progressive sleight of hand, complaining that workers can already decline union membership to avoid paying dues. Without workplace freedom, non-members in unionized workplaces can be forced to pay “fair share” fees equaling up to 90 percent of member dues, typically hundreds of dollars per year.

Currently, Ohioans can request a refund of “fair share” fees not used for representation purposes – if they wish to undertake a lengthy legal process guaranteed to draw the ire of union bosses.

Defending this status quo, Rugola said, “the last time I checked, states weren’t allowed to opt out on universal suffrage, and ignore, you know, the amendment to the Constitution that granted women the right to vote – that was a decision made by a democratic process and a majority vote.”

Rugola continued, “States can’t undo the amendment to the Constitution that eliminated slavery in this country, just because on a whim they might want to do so.”

“So, the bottom line is, that we’re all obligated by democratic principles to accept the decisions of majorities. And in our case, when our workers make these choices, it’s done – again – by majority vote, and they’re all offered the opportunity to undo that decision by majority vote any time that they want to,” Rugola said, neglecting to mention that it takes 30 percent of workers in a bargaining unit just to initiate a decertification vote.

Public school employees hired into districts organized by OAPSE must choose between contributing to Rugola’s $253,351 salary or finding a new job, based purely on the fact that their predecessors voted to unionize.

“So I think it’s important that we remember that if there’s somebody standing up for freedom, it’s probably the folks in this room and the trade union movement, not the extreme right-wing folks who want to eliminate the right to make democratic choices that will then cover the majority of workers,” Rugola lied.

Workplace freedom would in no way limit workers’ collective bargaining privileges, and would neither prevent unionization nor make it more difficult for any Ohioan to join a labor union.

At the same presser, Rugola demolished his attempt to equate forced unionism with democracy while comparing the fact that a majority of Americans support workplace freedom with the fact that Nazis controlled Germany in the 1930s.

Rugola’s remarks in the next clip began shortly after the 30 second mark, following several cherry-picked data points from Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga:

“If you wanna see which states are generally poor, unhealthy, undereducated, underfed, then go to the right to work states,” Rugola insisted.

For Joe Rugola, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing more job creation, wage growth, and disposable income growth in workplace freedom states than in Ohio are inconveniences to brush off with union propaganda bellowed at high volume.

In early 2012, IRS Exempt Organizations agent Joseph Herr asked the Ohio Liberty Coalition (OLC) to provide times, locations, handouts, and instructor credentials “for all the public events conducted or planned to be conducted,” along with ”detailed contents” from any speeches or forums, as OLC reported at the time.

Herr also requested “a hardcopy printout of your organization’s website” as well as “hardcopy printouts” of any social media profiles maintained by OLC.

“We have been told by people in Washington that the IRS is under specific instructions to delay and scrutinize any applications having to do with TEA Party or Liberty Groups,” wrote Tom Zawistowski, who was then OLC president and now leads the Portage County Tea Party.

By January 2012, OLC had already waited a year and a half for an IRS determination on its application for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status.

Yesterday the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) published a March 1, 2012 letter IRS Exempt Organizations agent Mitch Steele sent to the Liberty Township Tea Party asking for information about any leaders or leaders’ family members who had “previously conducted similar activities for another entity,” had run or planned to run for public office, or had “served on the board of another organization.”

Ominously, Steele asked the local tea party group to “provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas,” a Cincinnati Tea Party activist. The IRS agent also requested that the group “provide information regarding the Butler County Teen Age Republicans and your relationship.”

Additionally, Steele asked the Liberty Township Tea Party to “describe the nature of all contacts” with any 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), 527, or for-profit organizations the group was associated with. He requested copies of all voter education, fundraising, and advertising materials the group had ever used.

A cover letter from Steele made it clear responses to all 35 questions – many of which included three or more sub-questions – must be accurate under penalty of perjury.

“Lois Lerner, director of tax-exempt organizations for the IRS, said the activity highlighted in the report took place at the IRS office in Cincinnati, which handles applications for 501(c)(4) status,” Dana Bash and Tom Cohen wrote at CNN.

“But documents suggest at least three other IRS offices did the same.”

According to FOX News, Lerner and acting IRS chief Steven Miller knew that the agency’s Exempt Organizations office was targeting conservative groups for months while the House Ways & Means Committee attempted to investigate what is now a full-blown scandal.

Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga and Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE) Executive Director Joe Rugola stuck with the strategy union front We Are Ohio and the Ohio Education Association (OEA) have employed for more than a year: lie relentlessly about what workplace freedom is.

Here’s what Burga, who was paid $140,420 in 2011, had to say about letting workers choose whether to pay union dues:

“Like Senate Bill 5, so-called ‘right to work’ and the workplace freedom act will attack middle-class, working families, they’ll attack worker’s rights, and it’s gonna drive down wages, it’s gonna make us less free, less safe, and worse off,” Burga said.

“Ohioans clearly spoke when they voted down Senate Bill 5, which was a similar sort of attack,” Burga told the press, continuing to draw false parallels between public union collective bargaining reform and a policy which would simply let workers choose whether to pay a union.

Because no union presser would be complete without cries of victimhood at the hands of corporations, Burga warned, “we need to ask ourselves, when is the last time a multinational corporation got behind something for the good of workers and working families and the middle class.”

Rugola, who was paid $253,351 in OAPSE dues last year, addressed the crowd next:

“America’s right to work states are the poorest, most unhealthy, and undereducated states in the union. That is a fact,” said Rugola, who later in his remarks compared workplace freedom supporters to Nazis.

“There is no question in our minds that right-wing corporate interests – motivated by what, I’m sorry to call, but what I believe is a godless greed – no doubt, no doubt would like to line up with the right-wing extremist legislators all over the country and here in Ohio to add our state’s middle-class and working families to the long honor roll of desperate workers in right to work states,” Rugola added.

“For 35 years, I’ve had to talk every one of those members into voting to create a union, ok? So, right to work is anti-democratic in the extreme,” Rugola said.

Workplace freedom does not make it more difficult for anyone to form or join a union. Why do Joe Rugola and Tim Burga feel compelled to lie so aggressively to block a policy that would let workers choose whether to pay them?

In addition to the obvious merit of securing Ohioans’ right to choose whether to support powerful, progressive labor unions, Ohio has lagged far behind workplace freedom states in job creation, wage growth, and disposable income growth so far this century.

Timothy Zureick

Zureick, a 22 year old Cincinnati native, filed a motion to change his plea from “not guilty” to “guilty” after months of legal wrangling. As The Athens News first reported in October, Zureick originally pled not guilty by reason of insanity to accusations that he had forged the signatures of 22 Athens County Democratic Party officials and Board of Elections employees in June 2012.

Athens County Board of Elections employees who had not signed Zureick’s petitions alerted County Prosecutor Keller Blackburn, a Democrat, after finding their signatures on petitions Zureick submitted for certification.

In an interview with Media Trackers, Blackburn explained that Zureick could face up 23 years of probation, although Blackburn said that he found that unlikely.

“He’d likely have to do community service, possibly pay a fine, possibly have some local community jail in our Southeast Ohio Regional Jail, or another jail in the state. No alcohol, no bars—there’s occasionally a drug and alcohol assessment, if that’s what the DBSI [Disruptive Behavior Stress Inventory] indicated was needed… any number of things like that,” Blackburn said. “Certainly, ‘no contact orders,’ although I don’t know if the court would put any here, except maybe involvement in the political process, given his crime.”

“Being an elected official, being someone who takes part in the political process, it’s important to me that the process is fair and the process is uninterrupted by fraud,” Blackburn added. “These signatures that the Board of Election caught – these signatures, they did not get through to alter whether something should or should not be on the ballot – but still, it was an attempt to do that.”

“It’s something that we will not support or put up with,” Blackburn concluded.

Zureick committed his multiple felonies while employed by Working America, a campaign arm of the AFL-CIO, to collect signatures for Voters First Ohio, a union campaign to rewrite the state’s political map-making process.

Voters First canvassers were filmed seemingly breaking Ohio election laws earlier in the summer of 2012, but Zureick’s arrest has resulted in the only conviction to date.

After a brief standoff with police in Cincinnati, in which his father lied to police about his son’s whereabouts, Zureick surrendered and was extradited to Athens County for trial.

According to Blackburn, Zureick had attempted to hide from police serving the warrant for his arrest, but officers saw his car parked in the driveway and could see movement inside his father’s house.

Following Zureick’s arrest, the president of the Ohio University College Democrats claimed Zureick had not been a member of the group since 2010. However, according to Zureick’s Facebook account, he regularly attended Ohio University College Democrats parties as recently as March 31, 2012.

Zureick’s sentencing is scheduled for July 2.

Governor John Kasich

“I would love to think that this could be done, that the Legislature could do it, and I haven’t given up hope on that at all,” Kasich said at a National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Ohio event on May 8, according to The Associated Press.

Gov. Kasich, who has pushed Medicaid expansion with progressive rhetoric and promises it would free up money for mental health programs, told the NAMI Ohio rally that “we have to tell people about why it matters and who the folks are that have to battle each and every day the challenges that come with mental illness.”

A central component of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Medicaid expansion would increase Ohio’s annual Medicaid costs by at least $500 million by 2021. Ohio’s reputedly conservative governor is nonetheless fighting for the PPACA Medicaid expansion because it would bring billions of dollars in new federal deficit spending to the state.

Gov. Kasich has falsely claimed the PPACA Medicaid expansion would be paid for using “Ohio’s tax dollars” which will be sent elsewhere if Ohio does not expand Medicaid, and has attempted to construe his pursuit of PPACA funds as something other than an embrace of Obama’s unpopular 2010 health insurance law.

The governor’s most recent endorsement of Medicaid expansion came one week after The New England Journal of Medicine released findings from an Oregon Medicaid study showing “that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes” in the first two years.

Six days before Kasich said he supports expanding Medicaid “however we get there,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) reported that small business owners in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, and Missouri had sued the IRS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over an IRS rule meant to prop up PPACA in states without state-run insurance exchanges.

“The Obama administration plans to tax, borrow, and spend more than half a trillion dollars in clear violation of Obamacare, yet still says Obamacare is ‘the law of the land,’” Cato Institute health policy director Michael Cannon told CEI.

Last November, Cannon explained that states should reject both PPACA insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion in order to block PPACA’s implementation and force reform. A year earlier, Cannon and Case Western Reserve University Professor Jonathan Adler shined a spotlight on the IRS rule as an attempt “to rewrite the law by fiat.”

Cannon, one of America’s leading free market voices, refuted the Kasich administration’s Medicaid expansion talking points during March 13 testimony before the Ohio House. The governor has made no discernible effort to address Cannon’s criticisms, instead relying on Ohio’s legacy press to ignore arguments against the PPACA Medicaid expansion.

Shortly after the Ohio General Assembly refused Gov. Kasich’s calls to expand Medicaid as part of the biennial budget, The Washington Post reported that only 20 states have agreed to adopt the PPACA Medicaid expansion.

As Media Trackers reported in February, Governor Kasich did not seek the input of conservative health policy experts prior to announcing on February 4 that he wanted to expand Medicaid. Instead, Kasich worked with the socialized medicine advocates at the Universal Health Care Action Network of Ohio (UHCAN Ohio) on messaging to pressure the Republican-controlled legislature.

Kasich’s continued support for expanding the enormous entitlement program follows months of deceptive marketing from the Republican governor, health industry lobbying groups, progressive activists, and left-wing journalists.

Bill Ayers (left) and Kent State lecturer Idris Kabir Syed

Syed told Media Trackers that Ayers was “absolutely” an appropriate speaker for the May 4 KSU commemoration of the deaths of four students at the hands of the National Guard during a Vietnam War riot, “especially since Mr. Ayers had a connection to Kent State University as far back as the early 1960s – I definitely feel it was relevant.”

“Terry Robins, [Ayers's] roommate who died in the Weather Underground bombing in New York, was actually a student here at Kent State,” Syed said. “He was instrumental as a member of Students for a Democratic Society, and Kent State had one of the strongest SDS chapters in the country.”

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a socialist organization, and Robbins died while making explosives which authorities believe were intended for use at a military dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Syed advises the May 4th Task Force, a group created by KSU student government leaders in 1975 ”to raise awareness regarding misunderstood truths about the Kent State tragedy of May 4, 1970″ and promote “understanding about the importance of recognizing and maintaining the tradition of KSU student activism promoting positive social change.”

Syed, who was present at the meeting where the May 4th Task Force decided to invite Ayers to the memorial event, told Media Trackers “there were no objections by the May 4th Task Force” to Ayers’ selection, adding that Ayers’s “persona has been extremely maligned.”

The KSU lecturer expressed confusion about the controversy surrounding Ayers, saying he found it “very fascinating that people are interested at all” in the unrepentant domestic terrorist’s background.

“People only talk about the sensational aspects of his personality, without looking at the hard work and activism which he’s engaged in for the past 40 years. So, that’s my point – my point is that people only look at him as ‘Obama’s terrorist’ or whatever,” Syed said, referring to the fact that Ayers helped launch President Obama’s political career.

“What I’m saying is that the mass media portrays him in that way, without understanding or recognizing the history and the strong educational background with which he’s put himself out there.”

“I don’t think people understand the context behind Ayers’s involvement [with Weather Underground's bombings],” Syed explained. “I don’t think that they understand the technicalities of Ayers’s involvement in the movement. Context is everything.”

“On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that we were entering Cambodia. It was something that activists already knew, they knew about Laos too, that the war was on 3 fronts,” Syed said in a 2010 interview with Revolution, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA. “But Nixon having that press conference and admitting it was the catalyst.”

“We’re at war on three fronts now – in Iraq, Afghanistan, and secretly in Pakistan – so to me it’s one of the reasons that I wanted to get involved as faculty advisor this year. To really push that radical agenda for the youth,” Syed told the communist publication.

Syed explained that for a 2010 conference, the May 4th Task Force brought leaders from SDS, Weather Underground, and other radical leftist groups to KSU to educate students about “racism, classism, sexism, [and] heterosexism” and the “huge inequities versus this plutocracy that runs the world.”

Logo for Legalize Ohio, a pro-marijuana legalization organization in Ohio.

House Bill 153 (HB 153), cosponsored by Rep. Mike Foley (D-Cleveland) and Rep. Dan Ramos (D-Lorain), would allow and regulate marijuana use for pain relief and other medicinal purposes.

House Joint Resolution 6 (HJR 6), cosponsored by Rep. Foley, would place an issue on the November 2013 ballot to legalize marijuana in the state by amending the Ohio Constitution.

HB 153 would create a statewide registry of individuals allowed to possess and use marijuana as recommended by a “registered primary caregiver” for the treatment of “debilitating medical conditions or symptoms associated with the debilitating medical condition.”

If past performance is an indicator of future success, Rep. Hagan’s medicinal marijuana bill may be a pipe dream. Hagan introduced similar legislation in 2012 that was snuffed out by the Republican-controlled House Health and Aging Committee.

Commander John Burke, president of the Ohio Task Force Commanders’ Association and Warren County’s top drug law enforcement authority, strongly criticized Hagan’s “medical marijuana” bill.

“This is not the first time; he hasn’t had much success, or any success, but, yeah, I saw in the news that he introduced it,” Burke told Media Trackers. “Obviously, we’re totally opposed to it – the problem is that medical marijuana is not a legitimate topic, and it’s a scam.”

“It’s a scam by most people’s definition – and I’m not reflecting on this guy who introduced this bill – but people who want it, want to smoke dope recreationally,” Burke said. “I would appreciate it if they’d be more honest, frankly.”

Rob Ryan, president of the Ohio chapter of the pro-marijuana legalization National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), disagreed with Burke’s assessment of HB 153 in a separate Media Trackers interview.

“Well over a third of the United States’ population lives in a medical marijuana state. Numerous different medical organizations have given – one way or another – some sort of positive statement about the use of marijuana,” Ryan said. “Prohibition creates corruption. Marijuana is not deadly, is not addictive, and it truly has merits: medical use.”

HJR 6 would alter the state constitution to “declare that the use of marijuana should be legal for persons twenty-one years of age or older,” “in the interest of the efficient use of law enforcement resources, enhancing revenue for public purposes, and individual freedom.”

Under the proposed amendment, marijuana would be regulated in a manner similar to alcohol.

Similar ballot and legislative initiatives to legalize the medical or recreational use of marijuana have succeeded in 19 states or districts. In Colorado, where voters recently approved the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, state auditors determined that marijuana regulators were wasting taxpayer funds.

“Ohioans voted decisively in 2011 to repeal a state law enacted that year that would have gutted the collective-bargaining rights of public employees,” the Blade editorial began, embracing the union narrative that workplace freedom is the same as Senate Bill 5 (SB 5). “Last week, Republican lawmakers who evidently disdain that history proposed legislation that would make Ohio a ‘right to work’ state.”

As Media Trackers has explained, the workplace freedom proposals introduced by Rep. Kristina Roegner (R-Hudson) and Rep. Ron Maag (R-Lebanon) are a combined 16 pages which would prevent workers from being forced to pay a union as a condition of employment. SB 5 was 304 pages of changes to Ohio’s government employee collective bargaining law.

Not letting reality intrude on union talking points, the Blade continued, “Their toxic package deserves a prompt and permanent burial, next to the earlier union-busting measure, Senate Bill 5.”

“Then state officials, unions, and business lobbies can consider labor-law reforms that offer a meaningful prospect of improving Ohio’s economy and creating jobs,” they wrote, as if unions, Democrats, and their backers in the legacy media would stand for reforms limiting the power of union bosses in any way.

After noting that workplace freedom supporters tout the policy’s economic benefits, the Blade asserted, “the greater weight of evidence suggests that such laws help depress wages, encourage employers not to offer health and retirement benefits, deny rather than promote workers’ rights, and aggravate income inequality.”

What evidence suggests this? The Blade editors did not specify, but unions regularly cite the research of the Economic Policy Institute – whose board is stacked with union bosses and whose bills are paid by union contributions.

Consider the logic behind the Blade’s opposition to “toxic” workplace freedom laws: it’s the same argument put forth by union bosses themselves.

“Allowing workers to become free riders who need not pay for the wages, benefits, and workplace standards that union representation brings them will discourage union membership,” the Blade wrote. “That will tilt the labor-management dynamic in favor of employers, and threaten to roll back the gains achieved for workers through collective bargaining.”

If workplace freedom actually did “roll back the gains achieved for workers,” what would prevent workers from rallying back around the union bosses who claim to represent them so well? Nothing.

Workplace freedom rescinds no worker protection laws, affects no collective bargaining privileges, and does nothing to prevent anyone from joining a union.

The Blade’s rationale against workplace freedom, while framed as pro-worker, assumes that unions would be weakened by workplace freedom because a large percentage of workers are ungrateful deadbeats who should not be trusted to make their own decisions.

What apologists for forced unionism cannot explain is how that hypothetical situation would be worse than the status quo, where unions need only provide enough value to prevent members from putting targets on their backs by demanding a decertification election.

In Ohio, once a union is voted in, workers can be forced to pay dues long after those who voted to unionize have retired – and that’s just fine with the editors of The Blade.