In 1947, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. In doing so, it put an end to a long-since-forgotten era of labor unrest and paved the way to the prosperous 1950s.

Taft-Hartley curbed some of the worst excesses of Depression-era law that govern labor unions even to this day. Its greatest contribution to our modern governance was the state right-to-work law. States could forbid the pernicious practice of forcing workers to pay a union as a condition of their employment. Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress, out of obedience to the Big Labor bosses who underwrite their campaigns, are threatening to repeal and ban all such laws with new legislation. Their bill is inaptly referred to as the “Protecting the Right to Organize Act.”