WI Democrats tried rushing fatcat union contracts.

Oh, the wickedness of the world.

Let me describe the video below: it walks through an interesting scenario planned by Wisconsin Democrats with regard toGov. Walker’s budget repair bill. Essentially, what happened was that Madison mayor Dave Ciesliewicz (D) colluded with state senator Mark Miller (D) to convince Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette (D) to delay publishing said budget repair bill once it passed for long enough to allow Ciesliewicz to sign last-minute, fat union contracts. As the Fox7 investigation noted, while La Follette ultimately refused to play ball, this was eventually a moot subject, as the Democratic senators (who are recipients of considerable union largess), somehow ‘spontaneously’ all decided to flee the state anyway.

The reform group Citizens for Responsible Government called this “collusion,” and it pretty blatantly is. Remember, the problem here is not in trying to rush something through before a law is passed; that’s lawful, even if it it’s unwise, not truly legitimate, or more than a little rules-lawyering. The problem here was that Democratic politicians had engaged in planning on how to delay the law once it had passed, which is considerably more iffy from a legal, ethical, and/or moral point of view. That La Follette ultimately declined to play along may or may not be commendable (it depends on what would be a legitimate and reasonable length of time that it would have normally taken to publish the bill). That Miller and his colleagues played along with what was apparently Plan B is most certainly not.

(Via @jgramins)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: This is, by the way, precisely why such doctrinaire conservatives such as FDR hated the very idea of public sector unions. The temptation towards corruption is built-in, and is tragically easy to succumb to.