Free Republic

Organized labor may be celebrating the presidential election, but union leaders who take the long view have good cause to be worried. Proposal 2’s failure indicates the unions miscalculated the mood of Michigan voters and that a national trend of confronting public union arrangements will continue. The union machine has been showing signs of rot in the past few years. Union membership itself has been dropping for decades. State government leaders, including Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, have recently championed reforms to stabilize budgets and rein in the oversized influence of government unions. Voters...

Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law as atrocious as its government takeover of the American people’s healthcare? Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law so unpopular? Yes and Yes. In 1854, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. Their top priority was to repeal the Missouri Compromise prohibition of slavery in the northern territories. The author of this infamous legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was Stephen Douglas, a Democrat Senator from Illinois and owner of a slave plantation in Mississippi. Senator Douglas claimed the law would be a final solution to the slavery question, so that...