Scott Walker’s Magical Thinking…

He’s actually a progressive!  Really!

Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) testified before Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee Oversight and Government Reform today, saying:

In Wisconsin, we are doing something truly progressive. In addition to holding the line on spending and finding efficiencies in state government, we are implementing long-term budget reforms focused on protecting middle class jobs and middle class taxpayers.

While our idea may be a bold political move it is a very modest request of our employees. We are reforming the collective bargaining system so our state and local governments can ask employees to contribute 5.8% for pension and 12.6% for health insurance premiums. These reforms will help them balance their budgets. In total, our collective bargaining reforms save local governments more than $700 million each year.

Well, no, not exactly.  You might recall the “negotiations” in March, in Madison.  They attracted some attention, and the Bitch has examined them here.  To recap, the Governor asked for two separate concessions from Wisconsin public service unions: he asked for the pension and health care concessions, which he received.  And then Governor Walker demanded that the state employees give up the right to collectively bargain for work rules (they may bargain for salaries); however, he exempted the police and firemens’ unions.  (And oh, gee, those two groups tend to vote Republican.  Who woulda thunk it?)

Then with no small amount of drama and invective, the Gov, assisted by his bros The Bros, shoved his collective bargaining legislation through the Wisconsin legislature, spawning 1) the mass flight of Wisconsin House Democrats to Illinois to avoid the vote: 2) numerous recall efforts for Wisconsin legislators (Walker has to be in office a year before recall efforts can start); 3) recall petitions have been filed against Republican State Senators Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper (Republicans are circulating petitions against Democrat Senator Robert Wirch).  And then a quiet little state supreme court race became, overnight, a proxy war for the pro-Walker/anti-Walker forces, where the Dem candidate was leading by 200 votes, so it looked like a recount.  Then, two days later, some 14,000 uncounted ballots showed up… oh never mind.  Just Google “Wisconsin” and read about it there.

The point is, Scott Walker is probably the most polarizing elected official in America today, beating out even Sarah Palin, the President, Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader Pelosi.  And Chairman Darryl (“I used to steal cars”) Issa brought him to town to chat about his “progressive” reforms in Wisconsin.

Chairman Issa also asked Vermont Governor Pete Shumlin (D) to testify about his progressive efforts to close his state’s budget gaps, which the Bitch feels compelled to point out don’t involve trashing collective bargaining rights or mass protests, unlike some governors in the room.  Shumlin professed confusion:

“What is puzzling to me about the current debate about state budgets is that the focus has been not on bringing people together to solve common problems, like we have done in Vermont, but on division and blame,” he said.”I do not believe that those to blame for our current financial troubles are our law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other state employees whose services we take for granted.”

But possibly the best moment came when Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA-11) relentlessly pursued the question of Walker’s forthrightness regarding his intensions to bust union butt during his 2010 campaign.  Watch the exchange below:

As Greg Sergent points out,

The debate over whether Walker campaigned on that plan has been central to the Wisconsin battle since it began, and it remains significant now that the drive to recall Wisconsin Repubicans is under way. Labor and Dems have argued that their reaction to Walker’s proposal — from the Dems’ fleeing of the state to the decision to initiate the recall drives — has been justified by the fact that Walker never leveled with voters about his truly radical intentions.

The claim that Walker campaigned on the proposal has also been central to Walker’s defense of himself throughout the whole fight, and has been widely repeated by many Republicans and conservatives defending the Governor.

Uh oh.  I guess Scott Walker lied, huh?  And we all know how the Bitch feels about lying liars who lie…

UPDATE

He even admits it won’t save any money!  WFT?!!

Steel Cage Grudge Match Wisconsin

Meet William Cronon.  He is the Frederick Jackson Turner & Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  On March 15, 2011, Professor Cronon, who didn’t have enough to do already, researched and published a blog entry called “Who’s Really Behind the Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere” on his blog The Scholar as Citizen. His post got bushels of hits, and was written about and linked to by several major news organizations.  It also drew the eyeballs of the Wisconsin GOP,  which did not like what it read.

Two days later, the University legal department received a letter from the WI GOP requesting access to Professor Cronon’s work emails pertaining to the issues raised in his blog post of 3/15, citing the Wisconsin Open Records Law (WORL) as covering authority. The request included search terms like “Governor Scott Walker,” “Speaker of the Assembly Jeff Fitzgerald” and “Senator Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.”  Also the words “recall”  and “Republican.”  Clearly the Wisconsin GOP were hoping to find a smoking email trail proving that state employee Professor William Cronon used work time and work email to plot against state authorities.  The horror, the horror!

What in the world had Professor Cronon published that put the GOP’s knickers in such a twist?

Well….boys and girls, Professor Cronon wrote about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative nonpartisan state legislators funded by private money (meaning undisclosed donors and undisclosed members, including the state legislators themselves).  ALEC serves to assist its elected members hone, draft and craft legislation around a variety of topics dear to conservative nonpartisan legislators, like abortion restrictions and abolishing collective bargaining, returning power to the states,  and the like.  ALEC was founded by (among others) Paul Weyrich, a granddaddy of the American conservative movement; it is the forum where Russell Pearce, the Arizona legislator who introduced that state’s draconian anti-immigrant bill (now law), refined his monstrous piece of ill-will.  ALEC is why so many similar laws have sprung up in current legislative sessions: its members share what works through “model legislation.”  ALEC was the proving ground for the Wisconsin collective-bargaining bill.  That’s what Professor Cronon discovered and posted on his blog.

Professor Cronon wrote,

But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Speaking of membership, ALEC charges state legislators $100 for a 2 yr term and $200 for a four-year term; corporate support starts at $7,000 and goes to $25,000.

Then there’s this, from the ALEC corporate membership brochure, which Professor C thoughtfully provides:

ALEC’s national Task Forces serve as public-policy laboratories where legislators develop model policies to use across the country. The nine Task Forces commission research, publish issue papers, convene workshops, distribute issue alerts, and serve as clearinghouses of information on free-market policies in the states.

The centerpiece of the Task Forces is ALEC’s model legislation. [Bitch's emphasis.] To date, ALEC has considered, written, and approved hundreds of model bills, resolutions, and policy statements. Historically, during each legislative cycle, ALEC legislators introduce more than 1,000 pieces of legislation based on these models, approximately 17 percent of which are enacted. [Same]

The nine task forces include Civil Justice, Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development, Education, Health and Human Services, International Relations, Natural Resources, Public Safety and Elections, Tax and Fiscal Policy, Telecommunications and Information Technology.   Of course, you’ll be glad to know that corporate members may join as many of ALEC’s task forces as they can afford, since task force seats start at $2,000 and run to $10,000, depending on the topic.

So, to recap: the historic Wisconsin legislation overturning collective bargaining for public employee unions was not dreamed up by Governor Scott Walker or his allies in the WI legislature.  No, it was dreamed up, workshopped and perfected at meetings of an organization unknown to all but a few Americans and whose membership is a secret.  So in the spirit of open disclosure Professor William Cronon wrote about it on his blog.

Adding to the kerfluffle is Professor Cronon’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, which ran on 3/21/11.  (Professor Cronon made his discoveries in the process of conducting research for that op-ed).  It was an excellent piece and I urge you to read it after you finish here; Professor Cronon roundly condemned Governor’s Walker’s actions as flying in the face of Wisconsin’s progressive history.  Worse, he drew a measured and powerful parallel between Governor Walker and the late Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy:

Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.

Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

That seems to have put the cat amongst the Republican pigeons.

Professor Cronon rightly concluded that the Wisconsin GOP want his emails to embarrass and silence him.  So he did what everyone with a blog would do: he wrote up the chronology of events, noting dates, links and providing textual analysis, and posted it.  (Note to would-be censors: as Mark Twain is alleged to have said, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” or in this case with a PO’d history professor with a blog and a lot of readers.  He will embarrass you, and he has tenure.)

To wit:

If I’m right that this is the kind of story Mr. Thompson hopes to be able to tell about me, what should the rest of us think about that story and his desire to tell it?

My most important observation is that I find it simply outrageous that the Wisconsin Republican Party would seek to employ the state’s Open Records Law for the nakedly political purpose of trying to embarrass, harass, or silence a university professor (and a citizen) who has asked legitimate questions and identified potentially legitimate criticisms concerning the influence of a national organization on state legislative activity. I’m offended by this not just because it’s yet another abuse of law and procedure that has seemingly become standard operating procedure for the state’s Republican Party under Governor Walker, but because it’s such an obvious assault on academic freedom at a great research university that helped invent the concept of academic freedom way back in 1894.

Yet again: the man writes something critical of the existing political power structure in Wisconsin, and the state Republican party goes after him using the state’s Open Records Law.  Is corrupt, no?