Cairo in the Midwest?
By TOBIN HARSHAW
As a native Wisconsinite, I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the old saw that Badger State politics mirrors its geography: to the right of Minnesota and above Illinois. Well, the first part was proven last November, when Republicans achieved a near-stranglehold on state politics, while the latter is contradicted by the fact that this week all14 Democrats from the State Senate fled to a hotel across the border in the Land of Lincoln.
It all started when the state’s new Republican governor, Scott Walker, proposed a plan to cut benefits for public employees in the state and to take away most of their unions’ ability to bargain. The Times’s Monica Davey and Steven Greenhouse had the details:
Among key provisions of Mr. Walker’s plan: limiting collective bargaining for most state and local government employees to the issue of wages (instead of an array of issues, like health coverage or vacations); requiring government workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pensions, much more than now; and requiring state employees to pay at least 12.6 percent of health care premiums (most pay about 6 percent now) …
In an unusual move, he would require secret-ballot votes each year at every public-sector union to determine whether a majority of workers still want to be unionized. He would require public-employee unions to negotiate new contracts every year, an often lengthy process.
How have the state employees and unions reacted? Not subtly:
Nope, not subtly at all:
Lawblogger and University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, who took those photos, also had a brief conversation with a protester carrying another Walker-equals-Hitler sign: “I asked the woman if she thought Scott Walker was like Hitler, and she said ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Are you saying that you think fascism could come to America,’ and she said, ‘It’s what’s happening.’ ”
First they came for my 6-percent health care premium …
In any case, The Wall Street Journal editorial board sees shades of European anarchism in the protests:
For Americans who don’t think the welfare state riots of France or Greece can happen here, we recommend a look at the union and Democratic Party spectacle now unfolding in Wisconsin. Over the past few days, thousands have swarmed the state capital and airwaves to intimidate lawmakers and disrupt Governor Scott Walker’s plan to level the playing field between taxpayers and government unions …Madison’s school district had to close Thursday when 40 percent of its teachers called in sick. So much for the claim that this is “all about the children.” By the way, these are some of the same teachers who sued the Milwaukee school board last August to get Viagra coverage restored to their health-care plan.The protests have an orchestrated quality, and sure enough, the Politico website reported yesterday that the Democratic Party’s Organizing for America arm is helping to gin them up. The outfit is a remnant of President Obama’s 2008 election campaign …
And where the “remnant” went, the former candidate was quick to follow, as reported by The Washington Post’s Brady Dennis and Peter Wallsten:
President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin’s broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits and planning similar protests in other state capitals.Obama accused Scott Walker, the state’s new Republican governor, of unleashing an “assault” on unions in pushing emergency legislation that would change future collective-bargaining agreements that affect most public employees, including teachers.
This turn of events leaves The Atlantic’s Megan McCardle a bit perplexed:
On one level, this is extraordinarily odd — is it really the president’s job to be taking sides in a dispute between Wisconsin’s elected government and its state employees? But in another way, it’s logical, even necessary. State governments are where some of the hardest choices about taxes and spending have to be made. And thanks to a confluence of factors — ObamaCare rules that keep states from cutting Medicaid spending, poorly thought-out pension obligations that are now coming due, crashing revenue thanks to the recession, and in all but one [state], a balanced budget requirement — those choices have to be made now …Over the long haul … in the case of Wisconsin, I’d bet that eventually there will be a shortage of math and science teachers that will need to be rectified by legislative intervention. But until then, is it somehow morally wrong for the Wisconsin legislature to change the rules under which it will bargain with its employees? It’s incoherent even as a question. The legislature is the entity which is supposed to set those terms — and it’s no more outrageous for the GOP to favor small businessmen and the self-employed than it was for Democrats to favor a constituency which has become (as we now see) a de facto arm of the Democratic Party.
Yuval Levine at National Journal has no such ambivalence:
In Madison, no less than in Washington, Democrats are intent on avoiding the unavoidable and denying the undeniable. Public employees, most notably teachers from all over Wisconsin, have called in sick and shown up at the steps of the legislature demanding to keep all their benefits. And Democratic state senators, meanwhile, have literally fled the state to avoid voting on the governor’s proposal. Undaunted courage, again …Republicans and Democrats are both at fault for the mess we are in, and for ignoring and denying it for far too long. But so far only one party seems interested in changing that. Voters will notice. And then we will find out who is right about American voters: the party that thinks they are selfish children or the party that thinks they are responsible adults. I have a feeling Republicans will not regret their judgment that the time has come to get serious.
“Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is — or is not — facing at the moment,” insists Ezra Klein, they’re not caused by labor unions …Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don’t blame the unions.”
Ezra himself blames Governor Walker:
The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit. As Brian Beutler writes, “public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda.”But even that’s not the full story here. Public employees aren’t being asked to make a one-time payment into the state’s coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn’t their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin’s budget picture that wasn’t their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.
Klein’s colleague Charles Lane, however, thinks the press coverage has missed the real story:
What the unions and their supporters really fear is not the loss of benefits or even bargaining. Those provisions of Walker’s bill, though annoying, are not what has sent progressives into transports of incivility — mobbing the legislature; demonstrating outside Republican legislators’ homes; absconding to Illinois; closing schools through illicit teacher “sick-outs”; depicting Walker as Mubarak or Hitler; chanting “kill the bill”; lying about the governor’s alleged use of the National Guard …No, what the public sector unions really can’t abide is the legislation’s requirement that public employees vote every year on union representation, coupled with an end to the automatic dues check-off on state paychecks. For the first time in decades, these organizations would actually have to prove on a regular basis that they’re voluntary; and they would have to collect their own political war chests, instead of relying on the government to extract the cash for them.
Forbes’s Lee Sheppard has crunched a few numbers, and doesn’t like Walker’s math:
Walker’s enacted tax cut plan is punching Swiss cheese holes in the state budget for the benefit [of] smaller businesses in terms of gross receipts (sorry, couldn’t resist that one). Although the true cost of the tax rate supermajority requirement is unknowable, the Walker-instituted changes that can be priced add up to $100 million over two years already.That is, he may ultimately succeed in giving away, to a different set of businesses and individuals, the $187 million of revenue that the 2009 enactment of combined reporting was expected to recoup over its first two years in effect. The entire corporate income tax in Wisconsin raises $630 million annually, accounting for 5 percent of the state’s total general purpose revenue of $12 billion.
“The fact is, Wisconsin is not broke,” insists The Nation’s John Nichols. He explains:
The Fiscal Bureau of Wisconsin just said in January that it will end this year with a $123 million surplus. So the fact of the matter is that this is not being done because of a lack of money. This is being done because political forces, conservative political forces, would like to disempower public employee unions and remove that voice for a strong public sector. That’s what austerity really translates as. And I do hope people keep an eye on what’s happening in Wisconsin with a similar eye to what they watch protests around the world with. This is a place where we really are going to see a critical test of whether workers have the right and also the power to demand fair play.
Nichols feels the effects of the bill would ripple out from the Dairyland: “If Governor Walker pulls this off, if he succeeds in taking away collective bargaining rights from the union, AFSCME, which was founded in Wisconsin back in the 1930s, if he takes down one of the most — one of the strongest and most effective teachers’ unions, WEAC, in the country, then we really are going to see this sweep across the United States. There is simply no question of that. Governor Kasich in Ohio has already introduced a similar bill. We’ve seen Governor Daniels in Indiana, by fiat, do something of this kind a while back.”
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian’s man in Washington, doesn’t think the union reaction is knee-jerk:
I am not among liberals the world’s biggest defender of public-employee unions, but Walker’s proposal is obviously designed in terribly bad faith and is a first step toward trying to bust the unions altogether, an unspoken but cherished conservative goal of longstanding. Making public-sector employees pay a larger share of their healthcare premiums is one thing. Doing what Walker is trying to do is appalling. He’s just making scapegoats of hard-working people who contribute no less to the economy simply because they’re employed in the public sector.You can bet that governors and legislatures all over the country have their eyes fixed on Madison. People are using Cairo comparisons. That’s a bit overblown, but there is no question that what ends up happening in Madison will set a template for other states and determine how hard other Republican governors press their luck, knowing that unions are unpopular and that they’ll probably be retired by the time the people really feel the full effects of their policies.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air agrees with Nichols and Tomasky, at least in terms of what’s at stake:
The standoff in Madison could become a seminal moment in American politics. At stake is control over public policy. Will that control go to the voters who rejected years of Democratic policies that brought huge budget deficits in Wisconsin thanks to pandering to public-sector unions, or to the unions who need to perpetuate those policies in order to get the cash necessary to wield power? Will Wisconsin have a representative government at all, or merely a rubber stamp for union bosses?That same fight will soon come to Washington as well. The kind of cuts in federal spending necessary to get the US out of deficits will require a significant reduction in bureaucratic jobs. Unions will resist this as much as they currently are fighting to maintain the unsustainable status quo in Madison. Congress will have to eventually ask itself whether America has a representative democracy, or if Congress exists as a puppet for unions to manipulate.
For Vincent Vernuccio at OpenMarket,the issue is even grander: the future of democracy. “Despite the last election where the voters of Wisconsin ousted the big spending Democrats — the state is expecting a $3.6 billion deficit over the next two years — unions want to overturn the democratic process,” he explains. “Gov. Walker and Republican candidates campaigned heavily on lower taxes, less spending, and curbing the power of government unions. Wisconsinites approved of these ideas and responded in kind when they elected Walker to the governorship and Republican majorities in both the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate …
The government union message from Wisconsin is loud and clear: Democracy be damned and the voters’ will does not matter if it takes away our benefits or power.”
The last word here has to go to Ann Althouse, not just because she’s on the ground in Mad Town, but also because, as a state employee, she’s going to get hit in the paycheck:
It really is odd that Wisconsin became ground zero, because we didn’t have the budget disaster that was going on conspicuously in some of the other states. I’m really trying to understand this. Why Wisconsin? A distinctive thing about us is how good our public employees’ benefits are. The cut we — I’m one of them — are being asked to take is severe. (I’m looking at a loss of more than $10,000 a year, myself.) But it’s hard to complain and appear sympathetic, because we’re only being asked to go from paying 0.2 percent of our salary into our pension fund to 5.8 percent, which probably looks astoundingly low to outsiders. We’re being asked to pay more for our health insurance, but the coverage is extremely good, and the annual hit will be about $2,500 …I’m trying to be fair, and it’s possible that I’m in as good a position as anybody. I voted for Walker and support many of the things the Republicans are trying to do, but this budget plan — as I said — will cost me more than $10,000 a year.
And that, dear readers, is when the political becomes the personal.
