Wisconsin

So Wed night, Senate Republicans in Wisconsin rewrote their bill splitting out the collective bargaining issue into a separate bill, unrelated to the spending portions of the bill. The quorum rules that the Senate Democrats are exploiting as a delaying tactic by staying in Illinois only apply to bills that spend money. So they passed the collective bargaining limitations. Pretty clever realization, though I guess it was in the budget bill in the first place to hide it, but that didn't work.

There are lots of things to say about it. The hypocrisy of the arguments are pretty apparent. Walker said it was a deficit issue, Democrats said it was union busting for political gains. Ultimately Walker got his way by saying it wasn't a spending issue. Though he would say it's still a spending issue for future compensation negotiations. Also there's the argument that it affects funding of unions so perhaps that qualifies as spending, but that's not clear at all.

I'm ok with the Republicans using this tactic, as long as it was legal. I believe there are some questions about how the meeting and vote were conducted. I think they lasted all of 5 minutes which might violate Wisconsin's Open Meeting Law. The part I dont' get is if they found a legal loophole, and it sounds like they did, why put it in jeopardy by using illegal procedures. What could have happened by waiting a day or two as it seems the law requires. There was one Senator there yelling that he hadn't been given the bill to see it before voting on it. The chairman just yelled at him. The vote was 18-1 so I think it was a Republican yelling he hadn't seen the bill!

Still, if it was legal, then fine, they found a loophole, exploited it, there was lots of public debate (even though one side didn't listen to it). I was ok with Democrats using reconciliation for healthcare so I'm ok with this. Of course conservative media doesn't make the same connection.

Of course the real goal of this bill is to hurt Democrats and Obama's 2012 campaign in particular. State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) said so. "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin." Republican State Senator Randy Hopper also said " I think there’s absolutely no question that this is an issue for 2012".

I suspect this will all backfire for the Republicans. It will only serve to mobilize Democrats in a way that they haven't in 2 years. I suspect that at the next election (or sooner if recalls go through) Democrats will take power and repeal this (though maybe not). This is basically what Republicans want to do with the healthcare law.

My issue is how annoying this all is. Maybe I'm naive, but I think we used to be better at every 10 years or so coming to some compromise on something and passing things and moving on to the next. It seems now that both sides are entrenched and when one gets power they pass stuff and when the other gets it they undo it. That just leads to stagnation. I do think it's a little worse than that. Republicans are better at reaching and Democrats compromise even when in power, so things do skew right.

Some Democrat has to find a platform and start convincing moderates that they're correct (at least factually so). It should be easy because the right-wing noise machine is so crazy (even the right seems to be retreating from Beck now). Obama may be a great speaker but he sucks at actually using his bully pulpit. He admitted as much in November but hasn't done anything different. If Krugman can be right on everything for over two years now of the recession, with a platform as large as the New York Times and a Nobel prize, and can't convince anyone, even Democrats in power, I don't know if anyone can.