Today the five justices of SCOTGO — Supreme Court of the Galatian Overlords — made it a lot easier for the Right to take down public employee unions.

On First Amendment Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court delivered an unsubtle warning to public employee unions: You are living on borrowed time.

In Knox v. Service Employees International Union, the five—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito—reached out to decide a question that was not argued or briefed; their opinion all but begs right-wing advocacy groups and public employers to use its emerging First-Amendment jurisprudence to take down public-employee unions and in essence find a Southern-style “right to work” law in the Constitution.

The article linked explains the decision better than I can. Two justices, Sotomayor and Ginsburg, concurred in the result but objected that the written decision addressed “unnecessarily significant constitutional issues well outside the scope of the questions presented and briefing,” Sotomayor wrote. Breyer and Kagan dissented.

Next week: The Obamacare decision.

The Scramble — Click for Larger Image

More.

Rachel compares the Fast and Furious flap to an experience of being on a long bus ride and realizing the person sitting nearby and having a loud phone conversation is talking into a wad of aluminum foil shaped like a cell phone.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Priceless: Her encounter with people protesting Eric Holder because he is “anti-gun” but who could not name a single anti-gun thing he has ever done.

Here, Bob Herbert says that to immerse oneself in this issue is like being on acid.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

By all accounts the sting operation was a mess, both badly planned and badly executed. This was the ATF’s baby, and it’s not clear to me if Holder was even aware of it before the Right started kicking up a fuss. Holder pulled the plug on the operation last year and ordered his inspector general to conduct an internal investigation, which of course doesn’t satisfy the Right, because they assume Holder is guilty of something more than not keeping the ATF on a tighter leash. The head of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, resigned last year, probably not voluntarily.

Holder has turned over something like 7,000 documents to Congress, but says the rest of the subpoenaed documents contain information that would compromise ongoing criminal investigations if revealed. Naturally, in the fevered imagination of righties, those documents contain information of a vast conspiracy to gut the Second Amendment.

The Right wants to be allowed to go on a no-holds-barred fishing expedition in the ATF and Justice Department, and if in doing so they set criminal investigations back several years, or get more agents or civilians killed, I doubt they care.

See also Five Things To Know About The Republican Witchhunt Against Attorney General Holder