William Messenger of the National Right to Work Committee asked the Supreme Court today to hold that public employee unions are unconstitutional.

"This is—I'm just going to use the word here, it is a radical argument. It would radically restructure the way workplaces across this country are—are run," Justice Elena Kagan said from the bench. Since 1948, she pointed out, states have had the power to enact "right-to-work" laws that limit union power. Was Messenger arguing that "a right-to-work law is constitutionally compelled?"

Messenger didn't back off. "In the public sector, yes," he replied.

His clients, home-care providers paid by the state of Illinois with federal-state Medicaid funds, had started out arguing only that they were not "employees" for purposes of coverage by the Court's previous labor precedents. (Though they get state paychecks, they are selected and supervised by the families they serve.) But after cert was granted, their lawyers, the NRTWC's legal-defense fund, decided instead to go for the kill shot. They want the court to hold that permitting the unions to collect fees for representing non-members—the so-called "agency fee"—violates the First Amendment.

At least four members of the Court seemed ready to reach that "radical" result. The fate of public employee unionism in the nation seemed, by the end of the argument, to lie in the hands of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Roosevelt openly opposed bargaining rights for government unions.

"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, "I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place" in the public sector. "A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government."

And if you're the kind of guy who capitalizes "government," woe betide such obstructionists.

It was orthodoxy among Democrats through the '50s that unions didn't belong in government work. Things began changing when, in 1959, Wisconsin's then-Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed collective bargaining into law for state workers. Other states followed, and gradually, municipal workers and teachers were unionized, too.

Even as that happened, the future was visible. Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee's mayor in the 1950s and the last card-carrying Socialist to head a major U.S. city, supported labor. But in 1969, the progressive icon wrote that rise of unions in government work put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials. Government unions "can mean considerable loss of control over the budget, and hence over tax rates," he warned.