Wisconsin: Democratic Senators losing unit cohesion?

There’s some confusion going on with regard to the intentions and plans of the fourteen AWOL Democratic state senators from Wisconsin who have been hiding from their job responsibilities for the last two weeks. They are or are not or are or are not or are or are not* about to give up and just come back in; what is actually going to happen is still to be determined.  On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see what did happen over the weekend: the fourteen AWOL senators lost whatever unit cohesion that they might have had in the first place.  Two weeks of living on the lam and being politely chased by private citizens with video cameras will do that to a group, after all.

You see, we tend to forget that politicians are not identical, like potatoes: these fourteen men and women are just that – men and women – and it’s easy to believe that they’re getting tired, sore, and fuming about how they’ve somehow become the surrogate whipping boys for a national debate on public sector unions.  Some of them might even be thinking that they didn’t actually sign up for this, that this wasn’t in the job description, and that the people urging them to exile in Illinois might not really give a tinker’s dam about them or their problems.  And that this situation that they’re in is getting old.  Oh, sure, no doubt a few of the AWOL senators are having a ball… but some of them are not, and the loss of message discipline in the last few days shows that.

And it only takes one AWOL senators to end this nonsense. Continue reading Wisconsin: Democratic Senators losing unit cohesion?

WI Senate to fast-track Voter ID bill?

Hey, maybe we’ve got this all wrong. Maybe all those Democratic state senators should stay in hiding for a couple of days longer; it’ll let the adults get some business done.

…Republicans plan to move ahead with regular Senate business. In addition to tomorrow’s calendar, that could mean public hearings on other legislation, and possibly a floor vote on a voter ID bill that Democrats don’t like.

Background on the Voter ID bill here: essentially, it’s the usual commonsense notion that people who vote should have to go through the same kind of hoops to establish identity that we expect from people who, say, buy beer. The Democrats hate the very idea, of course – it’s not that they personally indulge in election fraud, but it’s a weakness of some of their dearest companions – so they’ve been fighting it tooth and nail in Wisconsin for years. Continue reading WI Senate to fast-track Voter ID bill?

#rsrh Well, the Democrats lost Joe Klein…

with regard to their petulant, violence-threatening protests over Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reform package:

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that. There are no guarantees that labor contracts, including contracts governing the most basic rights of unions, can’t be renegotiated, or terminated for that matter. We hold elections to decide those basic parameters. And it seems to me that Governor Scott Walker’s basic requests are modest ones–asking public employees to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, though still far less than most private sector employees do. He is also trying to limit the unions’ abilities to negotiate work rules–and this is crucial when it comes to the more efficient operation of government in a difficult time.

You know, losing Joe Klein? That takes skill. I’m almost impressed.

Via @ddson.

Moe Lane

Unions fuel the hate in Wisconsin.

[UPDATE]: Ann Althouse has a few photos up that rather starkly symbolize just how committed public sector unions are to cleaning up the mess.

(Via @keder) The Wisconsin GOP has put together a quick video of union attacks on Governor Scott Walker, which include: signs calling him a Nazi (and a dictator generally); signs calling him a rapist; and signs calling for his death.  What makes this a particularly hard-hitting video is that it’s interspersed with solemn quotes from Democrats who claim that their side never, ever, ever does such things: which is of course a lie, but a lot of these people haven’t internalized yet the notion that it’s harder to lie about this sort of thing these days.

Background, for those who need it: Scott Walker’s call for (limited) reforms of Wisconsin’s frankly out-of-control collective bargaining system for public sector union employees has caused a good deal of controversy, and by ‘controversy’ I mean ‘death threats.’  Excuse me: alleged death threats.  Anyway, as I noted earlier Lakeshore Laments is a Wisconsin blog covering this: note in particular the way that the ‘spontaneous’ sickouts seem to be mostly targeting Republican state districts.  It’s going to be a real interesting day in Wisconsin.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Scott Walker’s (R, WI) collective bargaining reforms.

This post by Ann Althouse on the anemic protester response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s budget plan – and it is an anemic response; it’s bad when you have to add a statue to your crowd in order to make your crowd look bigger – reminded me about Walker’s plan in the first place.  I got told about this actually by Kevin Binversie, who runs Lakeshore Laments, was recently involved in Ron Johnson’s successful Wisconsin Senate run, is a good guy, and who is unaccountably not being headhunted by DC Republicans*; Governor Walker’s plan is fascinating in its audacity.

Essentially, what’s happening in Scott Walker’s budget that has the public sector unions melting down is that he’s planning to strip some of them of some of their collective bargaining “rights.”  Specifically: Continue reading Scott Walker’s (R, WI) collective bargaining reforms.

Scott Walker makes Wisconsin a sanctuary state.

For Illinois businesses, that is: the new Governor is doing everything that he can to encourage a mass corporate exodus to Wisconsin, short of actually calling out the local National Guard to provide covering fire for the refugee columns.  This is less of an exaggeration than you might think: the official slogan that Governor Walker is using is “Escape to Wisconsin.”  They’re kind of serious about it, too: the Lt. Governor is going around and calling companies worried about the proposed Amazon* tax that’s about to destroy the business model of thousands of individuals and corporations in Illinois.

One thing that’s kind of entertaining about this situation  – well, there are many things that are entertaining about this situation – is watching folks attempt to push back on this by arguing that taxes are still technically higher in Wisconsin than they are in Illinois.  Indeed: the Democrats took the Governorship in 2002, the state Senate in 2006, and the state Assembly in 2008 – and then they promptly hiked taxes like they were, well, Democrats.  Which is a major reason why the state government flipped so overwhelmingly Republican in November – and why the lightning push to cut business taxes and regulation in January has Democratic screams of outrage for counterpoint.  I’m sure that Governor Walker would love to wave a magic wand and retroactively erase the bad business decisions of the Wisconsin Democratic party in an instant, but unfortunately this is the real world, where magic wands are not particularly known for working.  Believe me: if they did then the Democratic party would have invested in that technology years ago: it’s precisely the hardware that they need to make their economic policies work. Continue reading Scott Walker makes Wisconsin a sanctuary state.