Our political Quote of the Day II is actually an extensive post by John Judis who makes the case that as Wisconsin goes, so does the nation. Here’s the first part and you can go to the link to read the rest and make up your mind if he makes his case or not:
Last December, I asked a prominent K Street Republican what he thought his party’s top priority would be following its successes in the midterm elections. He didn’t mince words. “Public employee unions are going to get hosed, and they deserve to get hosed,” he told me. So, I wasn’t exactly surprised when Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio put the public unions in their states on a hit list. Not merely by trying to cut their wages and benefits, which several Democratic governors are also trying to do, but by trying to snuff out their very existence.
The governors themselves insist that, in depriving the unions of the right to bargain for their members, they will make it easier to balance state budgets. Never mind that the unions themselves have agreed to a pay and benefit cut, and that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker accompanied his bid to abolish collective bargaining with state business tax cuts of about $120 million. Of course, it’s possible that the governors believe that, in the future, they will be in a better position to reduce costs if they don’t have to bargain with unions. Still, it’s more likely that they’ve been motivated by an additional consideration.
For 20 years, if not longer, conservative Republicans have been lamenting the power of public unions to raise money and campaign for Democratic candidates. In the 1990s, Republicans put initiatives on state ballots to discourage unions from spending their members’ money on campaigns. And, in 2002, after George W. Bush tried to block unions from organizing workers at the Department of Homeland Security, Republicans embarked on a more ambitious attempt to deny bargaining rights to public workers. Now, Republicans like Walker seem to believe that, if they can further defang the unions, they can permanently alter the country’s political landscape. And here’s the scary part:
They’re right.Republican antipathy to labor unions goes way back.
Go to the link to read the rest and decide whether he makes his case.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.