The impasse and protests in Madison have become the new Rorschach test of American politics. Some highlights.
Is Wisconsin’s new Republican governor Scott Walker a union buster? Or just a beleaguered public official trying to reign in defiant public employee unions?
Turns out it depends who you ask or, in the case of the Governor himself, when you ask him. Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo website compares Gov. Walker’s interview Sunday with George Stephanopolous—in which Walker denied he was out to break the unions—to an interview the Governor gave to the conservative Heritage Foundation in which the Governor took dead aim at the rights of public employee unions to engage in collective bargaining.
In his Sunday New York Times column, Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman (who has no doubt that Governor Walker is a union buster) says it’s all about power and that Walker’s initiative in Wisconsin is connected to a national goal among conservative Republicans to destroy American unions as a counterweight to wealthy Republican donors like the Koch Brothers who helped fund Gov. Walker’s campaign last year.
In an interview with National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep this morning, the leader of the Republican-controlled state Senate in Wisconsin, Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, explains why he and other Wisconsin Republicans aren’t about to back down to the protestors. Asked by Inskeep why the wage concessions already offered by the unions aren’t enough, Sen. Fitzgerald insists that public employers in Wisconsin need the “flexibility” to negotiate with workers who are not compelled to be in unions and pay union dues.
Howard Schweber, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks both sides are playing fast and loose with the facts behind the current impasse. The state’s budget problems are deeper than many supporting the demonstrations choose to acknowledge, he writes. Still, he insists, it really isn’t about the money: “It’s about the politics, about the representation and about the duty that public officials have to treat their constituents who are taxpayers with a minimal degree of respect.”
Schweber writes that if he had to bet, he would bet that the impasse ends with the legislature passing the bill that Governor Walker wants passed, “and collective bargaining rights will be lost for a while.”
Schweber adds this note: “We have a long history of political division in this state: we elected Joe McCarthy and Bob LaFollette. But we have no history of governors seizing power and publicly declaring themselves answerable to no one. And Walker is trying to raise the threat level: a few days ago he was saying the bill was necessary to prevent 6,000 layoffs. Now that number has climbed to “11,000.” Governor Walker, did you really just threaten to fire 11,000 people unless your bill gets passed? Is that how you think politics works in Wisconsin?”
In the latest twist, reported by the Wall Street Journal this morning (Monday), Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz has proposed to end the impasse by suspending public-employee collective bargaining rights, until 2013.
