Last Friday, Ramco judge Dale Lindman shot down Mark Dayton’s the SEIU and AFSCME’s big money grap.

It wasn’t even a little bit ambiguous;

Luke Matthews covered the decision at True North:

Judge Lindman didn’t putter around the edges or employ a system of tests.

Lindman went right to the heart of the issue: the authority to conduct an election under Minnesota state law. He boldly stated, “The Minnesota Supreme court has interpreted a labor dispute as involving employer and employee relations.” Without such a relationship, the parties wouldn’t be engaged in a “labor dispute” but in some other kind of dispute.

Game over.

Oh, I’m sure there will be an appeal; AFSCME and the SEIU have deeeeep pockets, and if by some hail-mary they can get Lindman’s injunction ruling and injunction reversed they’ll get a lot deeper.

Matthews goes through a bit of the genesis of this case – one where every single conservative commentator and every daycare provider I talked with (and all by a tiny shaving of those I heard or read) knew from the beginning that the claimed “employer/employee relationship” was bogus?

So, where did Dayton get his odd phrase of “regardless of whether there is an employer or employee relationship?” It was found in the BMS statute.

The union thugs, through Dayton’s order, twisted the meaning of the statute in question. The text of the statute is, “regardless of whether or not the disputants stand in the proximate relation of employer and employee.” Proximate relationship of employer and employee probably refers to the legal definition of two parties. It allows that people outside the standard tax definition of employer/employee may have a labor dispute and the BMS can mediate it. Just because they are contract workers and therefore technically not “employees” of a company, it could be a labor dispute. Even if a holding company wasn’t technically an employer of certain workers, it could still be deemed a labor dispute.

The union bosses and their pet pony Dayton tried to use the language to create a new power for the BMS. This would give Dayton’s union allies some truly broad latitude.

And that latitude was, had it become law, potentially even more drastic than the perversions of the Commerce Clause starting during the Roosevelt administration.  Under Dayton’s the SEIU and AFSCME’s version of the law, anyone who receives any aid, no matter how indirectly, from the government, is a government employee.

Daycare workers, some of whom participate in government food assistance programs for low-income clients, and some of whose clients themselves are on assistance, including daycare assistance?  Notwithstanding the fact that the parents are the “employers” and the daycare providers are (very) technically their employees (really service providers, but work with me here), the daycare providers would be “government employees” for purposes of…

…of what?

Being “represented” by government-workers unions.

How far does this get taken?

Are auto mechanics “government employees”, and liable for AFSCME dues, because the cars they repair wouldn’t get far without government roads?

Are the employees of very grocery store that accepts WIC, EBT and food assistance “government employees”?  Do employees of every clinic that takes Medicare and Medicaid payments de facto dues-paying AFSCME members?  (Wait – Obamacare means they will be, sooner or later.  Strike that).

Do Ed and I qualify as “federal employees” – or at least federal union dues-payers – because our radio station operates on a wavelength administered by the FCC?

Never thought I’d compliment a Ramco judge on his, well, judgment.  But kudos, Judge Lindman.