Today's Seattle Times letters to the editor page ran this:

Union ruling

WEA acted in good faith

Editor, The Times:

Under inflammatory headlines, but without an underlying basis of factual support, two recent editorials attacked the Washington Education Association after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the union ["Slapdown of WEA," Times, Opinion, June 15, and "WEA ducks and weaves after Supreme Court loss," Times, Opinion, June 19].

For the record, the Supreme Court decision was narrow, finding only that provisions of Washington campaign-finance law regulating union spending are constitutional. The court did not find, as The Times implies, that the WEA violated or intended to violate the law. Indeed, evidence presented in lower courts shows that the WEA made every good-faith effort to fully abide by an ambiguous and internally inconsistent set of rules.

The justices have sent the matter back to state courts to rule on the narrow, technical issues that remain unresolved. Though detractors will continue to exploit the period of prolonged litigation as an opportunity to bash unions, the WEA trusts the courts will ultimately clarify Washington's murky campaign spending and reporting requirements, thereby allowing educators to fully exercise their collective right and responsibility to advocate for urgent priorities such as reasonable class sizes, good pay for educators and common-sense testing practices.

— Charles Hasse, president, Washington Education Association, Federal Way

Yeah, and the sky is purple and money grows on trees and conservatives have red horns sticking out.  Ambiguity seems to be the only argument the WEA has left so let's smoke this argument out, shall we?

One needs only look at the Supreme Court decision summary:

We hold that it does not violate the First Amendment for a State to require that its public-sector unions receive affirmative authorization from a nonmember before spending that nonmember’s agency fees for election-related purposes.

How hard could it be to simply ask - as in, "May I please have your donation?" - to somebody who has opted out???  How hard could it be to boil down a Hudson Packet to one or two pieces of paper or better still an online form?  Pardon the drive-by, but this appears hard enough for a greedy WEA to whine about ambiguity.