Justin's Political Corner

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) initiated a high-profile effort to bust his state’s public sector unions in 2011, he said that he had no interest in pursuing similar efforts against private sector unions. “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development,” Walker has said. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that he “has consistently downplayed seeking any restrictions on private unions in public statements.”

Walker also said in December that “he wouldn’t pursue any new bills on public or private unions in the coming legislative session.” However, word evidently did not get down to his Republican colleagues, who introduced and are fast-tracking a bill to allow employers to cut hours of union workers without the unions’ consent:

Republicans are hurrying bills through the Wisconsin Legislature that they say could prevent layoffs by allowing companies to cut back workers’ hours, but Democrats on Tuesday called them a renewed GOP attack on unions.

The bills wouldn’t require companies to negotiate with unions about cutting back hours, in contrast to almost all similar laws in other states. But a spokeswoman for the author of the Assembly version of the Wisconsin proposal said there was no intent to harm organized labor.

The Wisconsin GOP is moving this bill under the guise of creating a “work-sharing” program, which is an idea aimed at using government support to allow businesses to cut back worker hours while not laying off employees (with the government picking up the tab for the hours workers miss).

“Republicans began their war on bargaining rights with Act 10, and with this bill they have nowturned their attention to private sector unions,” said state senate Minority Leader Chris Larson (D). “This bill is a clear opening shot at undermining private sector unions.” “The Farrow-Brooks bill says that private sector unions shouldn’t be able to negotiate for their members. It’s one more step toward their goal of ending the right of Wisconsin citizens to have their voice heard in the workplace,” added State Senator Julie Lassa (D).

H/T: Pat Garofalo at Think Progress Economy

MADISON, Wis. — A law enforcement union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of a Wisconsin law effectively ending collective bargaining for most public workers.

The lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association seeks to strike down the law, championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, as a violation of constitutional rights of free speech, association and equal protection. While state troopers and motor vehicle inspectors were exempted from the law, University of Wisconsin officers, Capitol police and Department of Transportation field agents were not.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s spokeswoman Dana Brueck issued a statement saying the complaint was under review.

“We believe (the law) is constitutional, and that we’ll ultimately prevail,” she said.

The lawsuit comes less than two months after a Dane County judge ruled the law unconstitutional as it applies to school district and local government workers. That ruling came in a case brought by Madison teachers and Milwaukee city workers. It did not apply to state workers. Van Hollen is appealing that ruling.

The new lawsuit filed in Dane County Circuit Court challenges the law as it pertains to law enforcement officers who had been represented for collective bargaining purposes by the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association.

The law, which applies to nearly all public workers, allows collective bargaining only for base salary increases no greater than the rate of inflation. Collective bargaining over other issues, such as workplace safety, hours and job security, is not allowed.

It also required workers to pay more for their health insurance and pension benefits, a move Walker said was necessary to plug a $3.6 billion budget gap. It also did away with automatic union dues withdrawals and forced annual votes to keep unions organized.

Walker’s opponents said his true intent was not to balance the budget but to quash public unions, a strong political force typically for Democrats.

The WLEA said in a statement that the law “fractured the union and the solidarity of its members, undermining their ability to join together and advocate for the best conditions to keep Wisconsin roads and communities safe.”

h/t: HuffPo

MADISON, Wis. — A judge has rejected the state of Wisconsin’s request to put on hold his earlier ruling striking down large portions of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s contentious collective bargaining law.

Dane County District Judge Juan Colas on Monday released his ruling rejecting the request for a stay.

Colas in September ruled the law stripping most public workers of nearly all their union rights violates teachers and local government workers’ free speech, free association and equal protection rights.

Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen had asked for a stay while he appeals. 

h/t: Huffington Post

Suck it, Walker!

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin judge has struck down the state law championed by Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for most public workers.

Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas ruled Friday that the law violates both the state and U.S. Constitution and is null and void. The ruling comes after a lawsuit brought by the Madison teachers union and a union for Milwaukee city employees.

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie says he is confident the decision will be overturned on appeal.

h/t: Yahoo! News

The Democratic National Committee is asking its national supporters in an email Wednesday to contribute to the recall fight against Gov. Scott Walker.

A party official said the solicitation is going out to “millions” of people who have supported the party and the Obama campaign in the past.

The national party has been criticized by some on the left for not doing more for Tom Barrett’s campaign against Gov. Scott Walker.

Party officials have pushed back against that criticism. 

In the fundraising e-mail, Wasserman Schultz says:

“Of all the elections we are preparing for in 2012, one of the most important ones isn’t happening in November.

On June 5th, the people of Wisconsin will have their chance to recall Governor Scott Walker, whose attacks on workers’ and women’s rights are the definition of a fireable offense. Democrats are rallying around our nominee, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, and with just 14 days to go before the election, we’re organizing one of the largest get-out-the-vote efforts in state history.

Will you donate today to help Wisconsin Democrats build the grassroots organization it’s going to take to beat Scott Walker and win in 2012? 

It’s up to Democrats across the country to help win this thing.”

It’s about damn time that DWS and the Dems do something about the Recall race!

h/t: Craig Gilbert at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Janesville, Wisconsin, teachers who signed—or simply may have signed—petitions to recall Gov. Scott Walker are being targeted by an anonymous group. The group, fronted for by Citizens for Responsible Government, a conservative Milwaukee organization, filed freedom of information requests and obtained the names, job titles, and salaries of every teacher in Janesville, then produced a flier listing the names and salaries of the 321 highest-paid teachers. The flier urges recipients to look for the teachers’ names on a list of recall petition signers and:

At the bottom of the flier is a “Parents’ Rights Protection Form” urging parents to send it to Superintendent Karen Schulte and request that “my child be assigned to a classroom taught by a non-radical teacher during the 2012-2013 school year.” […]

Schulte said if she receives any of the requests, “they’re going in the trash.”

h/t: Laura Clawson at Daily Kos Labor

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker met with a billionaire campaign donor a month before he launched his attack on the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector workers and public-school teachers, he engaged in a detailed discussion about undermining unions as part of a broader strategy of strengthening the position of his Republican party.

After he initiated those attacks, Governor Walker testified under oath to a Congressional committee. He was asked during the April 2011 hearing to specifically address the question of whether he set out to weaken unions—which traditionally back Democrats and which are expected to play a major role in President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign—for political purposes. Walker replied: “It’s not about that for me.”

So, did the governor of Wisconsin lie, under oath, to Congress? The videotape of Walker talking with Diane Hendricks, the Beloit, Wisconsin, billionaire who would eventually give his campaign more than $500,000, surfaced late last week. Captured in January 2011 by a documentary filmmaker who was trailing Hendricks, the conversation provides rare insight into the governor’s long-term strategy for dividing Wisconsin. And the focus of the conversation and the strategy is by all evidence a political one.

In the video, Walker is shown meeting with Hendricks before an economic development session at the headquarters of a firm Hendricks owns, ABC Supply Inc., in Beloit. After Walker kisses Henricks, she asks: “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions?”

“Oh, yeah!” says Walker.

Henricks then asks: “And become a right-to-work [state]?”

Walker replies: “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

After describing the strategy, Walker tells the woman who asked him about making Wisconsin a “completely red state”: “That opens the door once we do that.”

The videotape from several months earlier, in which Walker speaks at length with his most generous campaign donor, suggests a very different answer to the questions from Murphy and Connolly. Indeed, the videotape shows Walker having just such a conversation.

It’s imperative that fucking bastard gets his pink slip on June 5th!

H/T: John Nichols at The Nation

It’s time for a rematch in Wisconsin.

Democrat Tom Barrett cruised to victory in the Wisconsin recall primary contest on Tuesday night and will face Gov. Scott Walker on June 5. Barrett’s win sets up his second gubernatorial fight with Walker in less than two years. With 81 percent of precincts reporting, Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, led his top challenger, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, 57 percent to 35 percent.

Firefighter and union leader Mahlon Mitchell, who dominated the Democratic primary for the lieutenant governor, will join Barrett on the Democratic ticket in the June 5 recall. Mitchell’s impassioned support for workers’ rights and public-sector unions during the 2011 protests transformed him into something of a celebrity in progressive circles in Wisconsin.

Labor unions, who poured money and manpower into backing Falk, wasted no time Tuesday night throwing their full support behind Barrett.

“Unlike Scott Walker, we believe in democracy,” said Rick Badger, a local leader within the powerful American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union. “We are unified in our support for Barrett and will do everything we can to make sure he defeats Scott Walker on June 5.” Dian Palmer, president of the Service Employees International Union Healthcare Wisconsin, added: ”Tonight’s results prove that Tom Barrett has connected with working families across the state.” And Mary Bell, head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union and an avid Falk supporter, also announced her support for Barrett.

Falk, for her part, urged her supporters to unite behind the cause of booting Walker out of office on June 5. She especially appealed to those in her camp who helped ignite and grow the popular protests that engulfed Madison, the state capital, in the winter of 2011. “Just as you supported me, we must now support [Barrett],” Falk said in an email to supporters. “We must support him with all our energy and enthusiasm. This movement needs the passion of all of you who have worked so long and with such sacrifice to make this recall happen.”

In 2010, Barrett, a five-time US congressman, lost to Walker by nearly 125,000 votes in a landslide year for Republicans. The GOP not only reclaimed the governor’s mansion that year, but also seized control of the state legislature. This time, the political climate is changed, and the state is divided on whether to vote Walker out of office 17 months into his first term.

When I spoke with Maslin in March, he believed that candidate was Kathleen Falk. Now it’s up to Tom Barrett to convince those coveted undecided voters that he’s the one to heal Wisconsin’s wounds.

H/T: Andy Kroll at Mother Jones

An appeals court in Wisconsin on Friday ordered a judge in conservative Waukesha County to vacate his ruling and rehear the arguments of a lawsuit filed by the state Republicans about the procedures for counting signatures in the recall effort. The big issue: That the judge had refused to allow Democratic recall organizers to get involved in the case and make arguments.

This means that Democrats are getting another bite at the apple on this matter — depending on the outcome of the additional litigation, state election officials may not have to spend as much additional time reviewing the signatures, which would further delay the election. (However, officials at the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections, did tell the Wisconsin State Journal that they will still continue to strike out “obviously fictitious” names.)

“To summarize, the recall committees have an interest in the complaint’s proposed relief,” the three-judge panel wrote unanimously on the Democrats’ appeal, “because such relief may include new procedures not required by law that may result in (1) striking valid signatures and placing an increased burden on the committees at a later stage of the review process and (2) causing delay to the recall process.”

A month ago, the Waukesha County judge had ruled that the Government Accountability Board must make a greater effort to screen out duplicate or fake petition signatures — rather than abide by the pre-existing rules, which had placed the burden mainly on the elected officials targeted for recall.

Previously, the judge had ruled against the Dems’ motion to intervene, which meant that the arguments were then conducted exclusively between the state GOP and the election board’s attorney. It is this decision that has formed the main basis of this appeal.

Meanwhile, the State Journal also reports that GAB officials are describing just what a daunting task this would be:

Friday’s ruling comes days after GAB Director Kevin Kennedy provided details about the board’s plans to comply with Judge Davis’ order to find and remove duplicate signatures. Kennedy told WisconsinEye (sic) that the creation of a database containing both names and addresses wasn’t practical or economically feasible.

“When we do our duplicate review, we may have a searchable database, but it will be limited just to names,” he said. “We will not include addresses in that because our focus is only to implement that part of the court’s decision that deals with being proactively looking for duplicates.”

Kennedy is expected to discuss the issue in more detail Tuesday, during GAB’s next meeting.

The lawsuit was filed by the state GOP in Waukesha County, the state’s major Republican stronghold, and ended up being assigned to Judge J. Mac Davis. Davis was a Republican state Senator over 20 years ago, and during the final years of the Bush administration, he was nominated for a federal circuit judgeship, but the nomination was never taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Since then, a separate court in Dane County (Madison and the surrounding towns) has granted the GAB an extension on the time it needs to review the 1.9 million total signatures filed against Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and four Republican state senators. The GAB was granted a 30-day extension, in addition to its statutory 31-day review period — but also said it could potentially need to seek even more than the time it had originally planned for, because of Davis’s requirements that they actively search for invalid signatures. Walker’s campaign was also granted 30 days total to review the signatures in order to file challenges.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM

Wisconsin Democrats announced Tuesday that they have collected over a million signatures to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker — nearly twice the 540,208 signatures, or 25 percent of the total votes in the previous election for governor, needed to trigger a new election.

The petitions are being submitted today to the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections. This will in turn set off a lengthy review process by state officials, before an election can go forward later in the year.

The state last year achieved national fame (or infamy), for Walker’s legislation stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights — and the waves of protests that filled the state Capitol and other locations, followed by a summer of state Senate recall campaigns that attracted tens of millions of dollars in political spending.

And now, the state is set to potentially become the second most heated and politically consequential election of the year, below only the presidential race.

The Democrats are thus boasting that they have not only surpassed the 25% threshold to trigger a recall — but have collected signatures totaling 46% of the electorate in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

TPM asked the state party about a possible skeptical objection: That the total of just over one million signatures is actually very similar to the 1,003,303 votes that Democratic nominee Tom Barrett had already received in the 2010 election, which he lost to Walker. Thus, someone might wonder, have they expanded their base to oppose Walker?

State party chair Mike Tate told us in response that there are still more voters to be found: “This total is enormous, but represents only a portion of the people opposed to Scott Walker’s radical, divisive agenda, only a fraction of the people who want to see him out of office.”

The Dems are also submitting separate petitions for: Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (845,000 signatures, showing some amount of drop-off from the Walker papers, but still well above the same 540,208 threshold); State Sen. Pam Galloway; State Sen. Terry Moulton; State Sen. Van Wanggaard; and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (who was not originally a top target of the state party, but against whom the local Walker-recall organizers took the extra initiative).

In all, then, the Dems have collected 1.9 million signatures, to recall both Walker and Kleefisch, and the state senators.

In their announcement, the party boasted of numerous measurements of the total collection of petitions: That they number 300,000 pages, weighing a total of 3,000 pounds — or two Holstein milk cows, in this dairy-producing state.

As a percentage of the electorate, it also surpasses the 32% that Ohio Democrats collected last year to trigger a referendum against Gov. John Kasich’s similar anti-public employee union bill — and in the previous two gubernatorial recalls in American history, the 23.4% collected against Gov. Gray Davis in California in 2003, and the 31.8& against Gov. Lynn Joseph Frazier in North Dakota in 1921.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM 

It’s the big day in Wisconsin: After two months of collecting petitions, state Democrats will officially turn in a vast number of signatures collected in order to trigger a recall election against Gov. Scott Walker.

In December, the Democrats announced that they had collected over 507,000 signatures in 30 days, getting very close to the legal threshold of just over 540,000 signatures in 60 days. (The party also told TPM at the time that this 507,000 figure takes into account also own efforts to weed out bad signatures.) They also said that they were working towards an even greater goal of 720,000 total, in order to have an absolute buffer against disqualifications.

State Democratic party spokesman Graeme Zielinski told TPM on Monday: “We’re confident that we will hit that mark.”

Over the weekend, the party announced a series of 22 petition turn-in parties around the state, for supporters to hand in the final petitions. And to keep momentum going, they also announced last week a “Recall Victory Day Schedule” for Tuesday — including the big petition drop-off at 3 p.m. CT, plus a victory party right near the state Capitol building.

When asked for comment by TPM, Walker campaign spokeswoman Ciara Matthews denounced the rallies.

“The Democrats have already held 22 parties to celebrate costing Wisconsin taxpayers $9 million for this baseless recall,” said Matthews. “Throwing parties to celebrate a taxpayer-funded recall election is an insult to Governor Walker’s successful reforms and Wisconsin families who are benefiting from them. Tomorrow’s events are just further celebration of big-government union bosses $9 million power grab.”

Matthews also said the Democrats’ have set high a bar bar for themselves.

“The Democrats have said since the beginning of the recall effort their goal was to collect 1 million signatures. The amount they turn in [Tuesday], will likely fall far short of that goal. Governor Walker won with an overwhelming majority in 2010 and we are confident that the voters of Wisconsin will not let blatantly false accusations of what Gov. Walker’s reforms have accomplished to prematurely end his term.”

From there, of course, the next step is to have an actual candidate to oppose Walker. Recalls in Wisconsin do not feature any direct up-or-down vote on the incumbent, but instead effectively take the form of a special election with the incumbent and a challenger fighting it out to serve the rest of the term. Now that the petitions are being turned in — after a period in which the party’s open preference was to keep the political focus on Walker — it should not be long until candidates come forward.

Previously, the Democrats had said that they would aim to unite around a single candidate.

Now, however, a primary is looking more likely, with many Democratic names being talked about as potential candidates: State Sen. Tim Cullen (who has openly said he will run in a primary); Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (who was previously Walker’s Democratic opponent in 2010); former U.S. Rep. David Obey; state Sen. Jon Erpenbach; former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and state Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca.

So all in all, this is just the latest step in a very long election year saga for Wisconsin.

The state last year achieved national fame (or infamy), for Walker’s legislation stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights — and the waves of protests that filled the state Capitol and other locations, followed by a summer of state Senate recall campaigns that attracted tens of millions of dollars in political spending.

Wisconsin Democrats, faced with a 19-14 Republican majority in the state Senate, attempted to mount a backlash against Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union legislation, by recalling their way to a majority. However, they were hampered by the fact that the only recall-eligible districts were ones where the incumbent had won their terms in 2008, even during that year’s Democratic wave.

In the end, Democrats were able to pick up two seats, just short of the magic number of three, for a narrow 17-16 Republican majority. Out of the recall campaigns that were waged by both parties, four incumbent Republicans and three Democrats retained their seats, while two Republicans lost to Democratic challengers.

h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM