A federal judge strikes down parts of Wisconsin budget repair law.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

The court side with state officials in upholding limitations on what can be bargained, but found the two other provisions violated the union members' First Amendment rights, considering that the same rules did not apply to unions for public safety workers such as police and firefighters.

"So long as the State of Wisconsin continues to afford ordinary certification and dues deductions to mandatory public safety unions with sweeping bargaining rights, there is no rational basis to deny those rights to voluntary general unions with severely restricted bargaining rights," wrote U.S. District Judge William M. Conley....

The state's justification for allowing greater bargaining by public safety workers - avoidance of strikes - does not stand up as a rational basis for requiring other public worker unions to annually recertify by absolute majority, and denying them automatic dues deductions, the court said....

ADDED: Here's a PDF of the opinion. First, the court upholds the collective bargaining restrictions:

There is no dispute that a state may bar its public employees from engaging in any form of collective bargaining. The only question is whether a state may restrict the collective bargaining rights to one category of public unions while allowing full rights to another category. The answer to that question is surely “yes,” provided the classifications do not involve a suspect class and a rational basis exists for a state’s line drawing. Here, there is no suspect class involved and plaintiffs have failed to present sufficient evidence that exempting public safety employees from the new, expansive restrictions on collective bargaining bears no rational relationship to a legitimate government interest in avoiding strikes of those employees...

While the court concludes that the carving out of public safety employees under the Act is rationally-related to a legitimate government interest in avoiding disruptions by those employees, at least facially, it cannot wholly discount evidence that the line-drawing between public safety employees and general employees was influenced (or perhaps even dictated) by whether the unions representing these employees supported Governor Walker’s gubernatorial campaign....

This is not an ordinary case in any number of respects, but it is ordinary in the sense that political favoritism is no grounds for heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection clause. Indeed, cases finding the true reason for legislation is pure animus directed at a particular group -- which cannot form the basis of a legitimate government interest -- typically involve powerless groups, like “hippies” in or gay and lesbian citizens of Colorado in Romer. Act 10 may cripple unions representing general employees, but these unions and its members are certainly not a powerless class.

Even assuming the lack of an adequate rationale for distinguishing between public safety and general employee unions, the Equal Protection Clause does not require that a state institute changes wholesale. As discussed, the State of Wisconsin could have eliminated all rights of public employees to unionize. That it chose to implement changes piecemeal, for one class of public unions at this time, while neglecting others, is not a constitutional violation. “The prohibition of the Equal Protection Clause goes no further than invidious discrimination.” Williamson v. Lee Optical of Okla., 348 U.S. 483, 489 (1955).

But the line between public safety employees and other public employs is not supported by a rational basis when it comes to the different treatment with respect to annual recertification:

[T]he court finds this onerous recertification provision would typically pass the admittedly low bar of rational basis review, but for defendants’ failure to articulate and this court’s inability to posit, how an annual, absolute majority vote by a wholly-voluntary union could rationally advance a reasonable purpose...

As for and the withholding union dues, the court said there was no rational basis for treating this 2 different groups of state workers differently.Because unions speak for workers, the court thought that the state's failure to collect dues for the unions presented a First Amendment free-speech issue where the 2 different classes of unions were treated differently.

Act 10 expressly exempts public safety employees from the prohibition, representing “a governmental ‘attempt to give one side of a debatable public question an advantage in expressing its views to the people.’”

The court thought that the governor and legislature were essentially subsidizing the speech that favored them and making it harder for voices on the other side to collect the money that they could use against them. The court saw "apparent, if not actual, favoritism and entanglement in partisan politics by discriminating in favor of fundraising efforts on behalf of public safety unions over general employee unions."