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The Wisconsin 14 Go Home

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on March 12, 2011.

03-12-2011 by L. S. Carbonell

Wisconsin Statehouse during protests

To the cheers of thousands of protesters, the 13 of the 14 Wisconsin state senators who fled to Illinois to stall a vote on a union-busting bill returned the Madison Saturday. Though a possibly illegal procedural move the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature had allowed Governor Scott Walker to sign a limited version of his Budget Repair Bill – minus all the budget parts – on Friday, the 13 vowed to keep fighting.

The focus for the unions has shifted to labor lawyers who are examining the bill in terms of both the legality of calling a conference committee to rewrite the bill without the notice called for in Wisconsin’s Open Meeting Law and the legality of any law that denies union representation to union members. Gov. Walker has said all along that collective bargaining rights must be cut for the public sector unions to allow local authorities more flexibility in their use of employees. He has never explained how that flexibility would help local governments deal with the $1 billion in state assistance to them that Walker’s budget calls for while barring them from raising local taxes. Flexibility of work assignment is not actually a matter for collective bargaining, but there is a Supreme Court decision that assures union workers the right to representation by a union representative in issues of flexible work assignments.

For those who support the unions, the issue now is the 8 recall petitions being circulated for those members of the Wisconsin State Senate who qualify for recall at this time. Half the Senate is elected every two years, and recall is limited to those who have served more than one year from the date of their election. Among the Senators who are being subjected to the recall petitions are two who won their districts with less than 200 votes and the now-famous Glenn Grothman, who stopped being polite to Lawrence O’Donnell as soon as the bill was signed by Gov. Walker. There are also recall petitions being circulated for 8 Democrats, but those are being done by the PAC Americans for Prosperity, which is run by the Koch brothers. The relationship between the PAC, the Koch brothers and Gov. Walker was exposed by a prank phone call two weeks ago that Gov. Walker took from Buffalo Beast editor Ian Murphy posing as David Koch.

Though the Wisconsin 14 failed to prevent the passage of the collective-bargaining ending portion of the Budget Repair Bill, they did succeed in ways no one expected at the time. The gave the voters of Wisconsin three weeks to discover what was in the bill, something that would not have happened if Walker had succeeded in pile-driving it through his Republican Assembly and Senate. They were able to see how much of the bill had nothing whatsoever to do with balancing the budget. They were able to hear how the purpose of the union-breaking provisions was to deny automatic union-dues-withdrawal in paychecks to deny the unions money to give to the Democratic Party. MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan was crowing about that part of the plan on Saturday morning and saying that if the rest of the bills being pushed in Republican-dominated states were passed, a Republican could defeat President Obama in 2012.

Wisconsinites were able to learn that the bill included a provision allowing the Governor to sell off aging power plants without taking bids, just as they learned how deep Walker is inside the pockets of energy-billionaire David Koch They also discovered a provision that would require a person to have an I.D. issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to register to vote.

The impact of the Wisconsin 14 goes far beyond Wisconsin. The protests made other people look at what was being proposed in their states in the name of “fiscal responsibility” – like the bill in Michigan that would allow the governor to un-incorporate every town and city and take personal control over the entire state through a series of appointed persons or companies. All he would have to do is declare that a town or county was in a “fiscal emergency.” The structure of the government that would be created is identical to the Qaddafi regime in Libya. In New Hampshire, a bill would deny voting rights to out-of-state or even out-of-town students. The bill is in direct violation of Supreme Court rulings on student voting rights, but since when do Republicans bother with Supreme Court rulings.

The entire nation should be cheering those 14 men and women. They gave America the time to find out what the grand plan is for Republicans to take control of the whole Federal government, to deny voting rights, to destroy unions in the public sector, to give away billions in tax cuts to their corporate supporters while cutting everything from medical aid to education. The Wisconsin 14 exposed the lie that the Republicans are only interested in saving their “broke” states.