It doesn’t just conflict with federal circuit court decisions and prior reasoning from the Supreme Court. It actually turns the First Amendment on its head.

In it, the Washington Supreme Court turned the First Amendment inside out by holding that the First Amendment creates not just a floor, but a ceiling, on the First Amendment rights of public employees over the use of their compelled union dues.

In essence, the state supreme court believed that everything not mandatory under U.S. Supreme Court precedent must be forbidden.

That is at odds with the fact that states are free to give individual citizens broader rights than the minimum conferred by the federal constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment gives employees who are compelled to pay dues to unions certain minimum protections, like not having to fund the unions’ political activities unrelated to collective bargaining on their behalf.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never said that states cannot give those employees additional safeguards, or that any additional safeguards would violate the union’s own rights.

Nor has it said that public employee unions are entitled to have the state give them the maximum amount of union dues they are not forbidden to collect under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Nor has it said that a public employee union has First Amendment rights to compel employees to pay it dues as long as those dues do not violate the employees’ own First Amendment rights.

The fact that the First Amendment itself does not give public employees very broad rights against the union they are forced to support does not mean that state law cannot give the employees additional protections.

Contrary to the Washington Supreme Court’s decision, it is well established that a state law can give citizens broader free speech rights than federal law gives them.

That is true even when the state-created free speech rights are at the expense of the interests of a competing private institution, as the Supreme Court’s decision in the PruneYard case demonstrates.

Moreover, in the Washington State case, the state law is not even being applied to a purely private institution, but rather to public employee unions who are already using state machinery to compel employees to pay them dues.

States frequently give individual citizens broader free-speech protections than they are accorded under the federal constitution.

For example, under the Washington State Constitution, and the Washington Supreme Court’s own precedents, a higher level of scrutiny applies to time/place/manner restrictions on speech than under the federal First Amendment.

The First Amendment thus creates a floor beneath which citizens’ free speech rights cannot be reduced, not a ceiling beyond which state law cannot further protect them.

Washington State properly relied on that principle by enacting a law giving dissenting employees more protection against political use of their dues by public employee unions than they enjoy under the First Amendment.

Many states give their citizens added free speech protection above and beyond that conferred by the First Amendment.

Under California law, students have free speech rights in what they say in a school-sponsored newspaper, although the federal First Amendment confers no such rights, leaving school officials free to dictate the content of such newspapers, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hazelwood decision.

Similarly, under Massachusetts law, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s Pyle v. South Hadley School Committee decision, students have the right to use plainly offensive speech to express a political point of view, although the Supreme Court’s Bethel decision emphasizes that the federal First Amendment does not confer such rights.

And in the PruneYard case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that California could confer a state-created free-speech right on citizens to engage in speech in even a privately-owned shopping center.

To me, that’s a much harder case than the Washington v. Washington Education Association case, which involves a public employee union.

But the Supreme Court upheld the state law nonetheless, even though it trenched much more on private property rights than does the Washington law under review in Washington v. Washington Education Association.