Vox Sentences: The first major ruling of the post-Scalia era

Supreme Court gives unions some good news; Trump's campaign manager charged with battery; US evacuating families out of Turkey.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A 4-4 tie is a win for unions

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• The Supreme Court released a 4-4 tie decision today in the case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, in a narrow, and possibly temporary, win for public sector unions.

  [NYT / Adam Liptak]

• The unions win because, with the Supreme Court tied, the decision of the appeals court holds. In this case, the appeals court ruled that a 1978 SCOTUS decision allowed the California teachers union to collect fees from nonmembers, and the Supreme Court let that ruling stand.

  [Reuters / Lawrence Hurley]

• The court's conservative wing has been gunning for the 1978 decision, and the concept of "agency fees" (union fees paid by nonmembers), for a while. During oral arguments for Friedrichs, it seemed pretty clear the conservatives were poised to rule against the union.

  [The Atlantic / Matt Ford]

• But between then and now, Justice Antonin Scalia died — depriving the conservatives of a fifth vote. The Friedrichs decision is therefore, really, the first big case of the post-Scalia era.

  [BuzzFeed News / Chris Geidner]

• That's not to say that the Friedrichs ruling will last. The plaintiffs are already planning to ask the Court to rehear the case next term, when (theoretically) it will have nine justices again.

  [Education Week / Mark Walsh]

• Even if the Court decides not to rehear Friedrichs per se, there's plenty of interest in challenging union "agency fees," so the Court would be able to take another case to deal with the same question.

  [SCOTUSblog / Lyle Denniston]

The state of Florida v. Corey Lewandowski

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Donald Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, turned himself in to Jupiter, Florida, police Tuesday morning to face a charge of misdemeanor battery.

  [Palm Beach Post / Lulu Ramadan]

• The charge stems from a March 8 incident in which Lewandowski forcefully grabbed the arm of Michelle Fields, a reporter for Breitbart, after a Trump campaign event.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• Trump and Lewandowski have denied that Lewandowski grabbed Fields. Unfortunately for them, video from the hotel/golf club where the incident occurred — a property owned by Trump, as it happens — pretty clearly shows Lewandowski grabbing Fields.

  [BNO News via YouTube]

• Trump's response to the charge is really something to behold. In barely a minute, he claimed that Fields's bruises might have come from somewhere else, that she was just trying to get attention, and that if she were really hurt, she would have screamed.

  [Andrew Kaczynski via YouTube]

• If you think these sound like things that are often said to dismiss women who are victims of violence (like rape), you are not wrong!

  [Kelsey McKinney via Twitter]

• The creepy, scary circus of it all doesn't really have a historical analogue. The closest might be the 1996 campaign, in which Dick Morris was forced to resign for letting an escort listen in on conversations with President Clinton. This New York Times column of the time has some great vintage hand-wringing about the coarsening of our politics.

  [NYT / Steven A. Holmes]

Getting Americans out of Turkey

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• The State Department and Department of Defense are ordering families of US personnel stationed in Turkey to leave the country, out of concern over "security threats."

  [Washington Post / Dan Lamothe]

• In part, this is due to concern about terrorism. Turkey has suffered through several major bombings in the past several months, from both ISIS and a Kurdish separatist group.

  [Bloomberg View]

• In part, it's because the US's biggest military base in Turkey, Incirlik, is increasingly on the front lines of the US offensive against ISIS in Syria.

  [Military Times / Andrew Tilghman]

• If Incirlik isn't safe enough for families, that might raise concerns about the security of the rest of the facility — including the up to 90 nuclear weapons that were being stored at Incirlik as of 2009.

  [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Alexandra Bell and Benjamin Loehrke]

• One might expect this to come up at the international nuclear security summit President Obama will be chairing in Washington starting Thursday.

  [Defense News / Aaron Mehta]

• Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be at the summit. But he's not necessarily going to have a formal meeting with Obama. Erdogan is upset that the US is upset about Turkey's crackdown on free expression.

  [USA Today / Oren Dorrell]

• That might seem like a relatively insignificant issue. But Erdogan is the kind of man who, when a song mocking him gets played on German media, literally summons the German ambassador to Turkey to yell at him.

  [AFP / Elizabeth Schumacher]

MISCELLANEOUS

There is a Japanese video game about army tanks that have been squeezed into the shape of teenage girls and ordered to seduce US Army students as revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This video game exists in the universe we all inhabit. [War Is Boring / Laura Kate Dale]

• As recently as a few years ago, a $15 minimum wage was a fringe proposal. Now California is set to implement it by 2022. And a huge reason why is sustained advocacy by SEIU.

  [Bloomberg / Josh Eidelson]

• "They" as a singular pronoun wasn't considered agrammatical until 1745.

  [NYT / Amanda Hess]

• Israel is capping total compensation for bankers at 2.5 million shekels (~$650,000) a year, or 44 times the pay of the bank's lowest-paid worker.

  [Reuters]

• In October, Jessica Grubb's parents shared her story of addiction to heroin with President Obama, helping accelerate federal efforts to deal with the heroin epidemic. Earlier this month, she passed away from an opioid overdose.

  [Huffington Post / Ryan Grim and Sam Stein]

VERBATIM

"If the biggest vote-getter of either party is Hillary—by a large margin—then that suggests the electorate is not necessarily as angry as pundits claim." [New Republic / Eric Sasson]

• "[Scrooge McDuck] was so full of bacteria, not only being a duck and not wearing pants but also being around coins."

  [Tatiana Maslay to AV Club / Alex McCown]

• "Do I have the ability to block my abusive ex-boyfriend from annotating blog posts about our relationship? That question hasn’t been answered by Genius."

  [Ella Dawson to Slate / Chelsea Hassler]

• "The reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have money, and so a really easy way to deal with that problem is give them money. It comes down to that."

  [Charles Kenny to Ft / Cardiff Garcia]

• "The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City."

  [Harper Lee via New Republic / Alex Shephard]

WATCH THIS

Tax Day doesn't have to suck [YouTube / Ezra Klein and Joe Posner]

Vox / David Stanfield

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via