The legislative sneak attack by Wisconsin Republican State Senators Wednesday night to instantly delete 50 years of public employee collective bargaining rights was a repulsive political outburst, a dictatorial exercise of illegitimate state authority, a self-inflicted partisan wound and an historic civic mistake.
Without proper notice, without debate, behind locked doors and in slavish obeisance to Scott Walker, these politically puny 18 state legislators put an indelible ideological stain on the state’s progressive reputation and their own careers.
Scott Walker has behaved since his 52 to 47 percent election victory in November as if he had a mandate gift-wrapped in a 70 to 30 percent landslide.
Walker and his legislative allies and far-right, Big Business-driven cabinet clearly have been in a bubble since the election, speaking only to each other – planning, scheming, politicking – without the restraint of wiser, venerable Republicans whose moderation had been expelled from the party years ago by the harder-edged Walker, Scott Jensen, John Gard and the Fitzgerald brothers, and national funders using Wisconsin as "the first domino," as Walker famously and honestly told the fake David Koch in that recorded, prank call, to push an anti-union, one-party agenda.
So by hook-and-crook, and with the false claim that the anti-union measures were crucial to closing the state’s deficit, then with another bogus assertion that their goals were "modest," Republicans finally admitted the anti-union measure was a pure power grab had no relationship to the budget, stripped it from the bill and made it into a stand-alone measure that:
- Ended collective bargaining for 175,000 Wisconsin residents;
- Diminished their professions and standard of living;
- Used state power to dilute their opponents’ political and union influences;
- Eroded middle-class living across the state.
Too clever by half: Walker and the Senate Republicans have guaranteed that recalls against them will succeed.
Let’s hope that the damage The Insignificant 18 and their tin-horned leader in the East Wing of the Capitol have done to Wisconsin is as short-lived as their tenure in office.
James Rowen is a writer, a former reporter and a former mayoral staffer in both Madison and Milwaukee. He is the author of The Political Environment blog.
