Ronald Reagan never happened. I knew something was wrong, I was under the misapprehension that all that childish crap you hear from the standard tiresome democrat idiots regarding economics was just as it appeared, false. Now, I don’t have to disturb my mind with such things as logic and reality, as everything is just as Harry Reid said it was! Oh joy.
In February 2011, Walker introduced his budget repair bill, which would become known as Act 10. It called for public workers to pay about 5.8 percent of their pension out of their paychecks, increased the employee share of health insurance premiums from about 6 percent to 12.6 percent, and cut billions in aid to Wisconsin's schools and local governments. In order to help offset the pension and health payments, Walker's plan made union dues optional for workers. And in order to help schools and governments deal with the cuts, he called for strict limits on collective bargaining, which would allow local officials to find the sort of efficiencies that unions had prevented him from implementing as Milwaukee County executive.
Walker's initial plan was to pass Act 10 quickly and move on, per Daniels' advice. Both the Assembly and the Senate had flipped to majority Republican control at the same time that Walker had been elected. After overcoming some initial skepticism from a few Republican legislators, he knew he had the votes.
But the state also requires three-fifths of the Senate—or 20 senators—to be present for any bill with certain major fiscal impacts. The budget repair bill was one such bill. There were only 19 Republicans in the Senate, meaning that if no Democrats were present, no vote could be held.
So Wisconsin's Senate Democrats packed up and left the state, camping out in Illinois, where Wisconsin authorities could not retrieve them.
In the meantime, the state Capitol in Madison became the locus of a massive protest. Tens of thousands camped out both in and around the building for weeks. The Capitol building and the grounds around it took on a circus-like atmosphere. People showed up in costumes. Reporters from Comedy Central's The Daily Show arrived towing a camel. The protesters, some of whom were organized by labor groups and some of whom were connected to Occupy Wall Street, set up daycare and medical facilities. Counterprotests sponsored by conservative groups backed the embattled governor. A group of doctors arrived and wrote sick notes so protesters could get out of work. (Twenty of those doctors were later disciplined by the state's Medical Examining Board, and others were fined by the University of Wisconsin medical school.)
It wasn't all fun and games. Walker and his fellow Republicans felt like they were under siege. Walker received multiple death threats, some of which were directed, with gory specificity, at his wife and family. State Democrats and their supporters, backed heavily by labor groups, staged a number of highly theatrical procedural protests, including a so-called citizens filibuster and a marathon 61-hour debate session over the bill's collective bargaining provisions. The showdown dragged on for weeks.
Why Walker Didn't Bargain
The most telling moment in the battle over Act 10 came early on, just one day after Senate Democrats left. The state's public sector unions announced that they would accept the hikes in benefit contributions if the governor would agree to nix the collective bargaining limits. It was, by Walker's own admission, a smart public relations move. The benefits changes he sought polled well. The collective bargaining reforms didn't.
This was the moment when Walker could have negotiated, when he could have backed down and settled for the considerable savings that the benefits overhaul still would have provided. But he didn't.
To understand why Walker didn't bargain, you have to go back to December 2010, the month before Walker took office. Democrats in the state legislature had just lost power in both the legislature and the Senate. But, under pressure from public sector unions, they held a lame duck session and tried, as a final act, to pass a new labor contract before Walker took office. In the Assembly, a Democrat serving jail time was pulled out on work release in order to pass the bill, angering Republicans. In the Senate, the measure failed, barely, when the outgoing Democratic Senate Majority Leader cast a surprise vote against it. The episode led Walker to believe that state Democrats and their union allies were not acting in good faith.
Walker's resistance also owes something to his extreme reverence for Ronald Reagan. Walker is—there's no other way to put this—a Reagan nut. He and his wife Tonette were married on Reagan's birthday, and according to Walker's book, every year the couple hosts a party to celebrate both events, where they serve Reagan's favorite foods and play patriotic music.
When Walker introduced his budget repair bill to his senior staff, he started by telling a story about Ronald Reagan's famous showdown with air traffic controllers in 1981. Some 13,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization had gone on strike. Reagan demanded they return to work in 48 hours. When they didn't, he fired more than 11,000 of the strikers, decertified their union, and prohibited the fired employees from all future federal employment.
"It sent a message that Reagan was serious—that he had backbone, that he was going to fulfill his promises, and that he was not going to be pushed around," Walker wrote in his book. "It helped win the Cold War."
Refusing to back down on collective bargaining, Walker wrote, "was our chance to take inspiration from Reagan's courage." And if it succeeded, "maybe our display of courage might just have an impact beyond Wisconsin's borders."
Though extremely contentious, the collective bargaining provision's passage was never really in doubt. Republicans had the votes, if the Democratic senators returned, and even if they didn't, there were procedural tactics that would allow them to move the bill. A little more than two months after Walker took office, Senate Republicans split Act 10's fiscal provisions in such a way that the three-fifths quorum requirement was no longer applicable, and the measures became law.
Skirmishing continued long after the fight was won—there were court battles, a 2012 recall election, a 2014 re-election. But not only did Walker and his plan survive, enough time has elapsed that the governor can point to concrete benefits from Act 10 (more than $3 billion in savings, his office estimates, $2.35 billion of which came from public employee pensions), many of which Walker's office has catalogued on a site devoted to the results of Act 10. Those savings have allowed local authorities the kind of flexibility that Walker didn't have when he was a county executive. Meanwhile, the opt-out provision for union dues has made it noticeably tougher for state unions to organize and raise money, a fact not lost on national Republicans looking to deplete one of the Democratic Party's main sources of funds.
Walker had successfully followed Daniels' advice, striking fast and winning big against the state's most powerful interest group. In March of this year, he followed up on his victory against public sector unions by signing a right-to-work bill prohibiting mandatory union dues in the private sector.
But what is the potential federal applicability of the governor's signature policy achievement? In April, Walker suggested in a radio interview that he might pursue a national right-to-work law, which would apply to states that don't currently have the policy, saying federal action was legitimate in order to establish a "fundamental" freedom.
Mostly, however, he portrays Act 10 as a telltale sign of unyielding Reaganesque leadership—an indication of his resolve and readiness to take on any number of other challenges, not all of which are obviously related to the showdown. "I want a commander in chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists does not wash up on American soil," Walker said in his CPAC appearance....."
June 17, 2015 - Peter Suderman, Reason: The Did Something Candidate