Wisconsin Dem. senators leave the state to block vote targeting unions

[the_future_modernes]

You read that right! This is epicness personified!!! The quorum needed is 20. Republicans have 19. Therefore the Dems have skipped town! ETA: Post edited for some accuracy Thanks laceblade!


Progressive Solidarity Movement Emerges In Wisconsin

Today, 14 Democratic Wisconsin State Senators walked out of the chamber holding up solidarity fists — denying Republicans the quorum to hold a vote on the Budget Repair Bill, which would strip public employees of their right to collectively bargain. According to reports, the State Senate Democrats have fled the state to avoid state troopers forcing them to come back into quorum. Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D) told WisPolitics this afternoon that “Senate Democrats left the state in an attempt to force Republicans to negotiate a compromise to proposed changes to the bargaining rights of public employees.”


Some state troopers have already told union leaders that, in a sign of support for striking workers, they are refusing to track down or arrest any state legislators that they encounter. Capitol Police already have refused to kick out of the State Capitol thenearly 5,000 protestors that the Wisconsin Department of Administration has announced are there. Early today, reports from Twitter and sources on the ground said that protesters were literally blocking members of the Wisconsin State Senate GOP from re-entering the chamber in case they tried to take a vote on the bill without a quorum being in place.
[laceblade says below that the GOP senators could not leave the Senate once the house call was made til Senate adjourned...see comments below]

The mass protests in Wisconsin seem to be turning public support strongly behind the unions there. President Obama, who in the past had upset public employees union byendorsing the mass firing of unionized teachers in Rhode Island last year andcalling for a federal wage freeze, gave a strong statement of support for the workers to Milwaukee TV station saying:MORE

Wisconsin update: Democrats in hiding, not coming back until right to organize is secured

Wisconsin continues to stand strong against Republican attempts to reduce the salaries, health insurance, pensions and rights of its state workers. Among the recent developments:

Governor Walker created the budget crisis
Scott Walker and the new Republican-controlled state legislature in Wisconsin largely created the deficit problem they claim must be solved on the backs of public servants.

Walker claims that the state is broke. However, the Wisconsin Fiscal Bureau, a sort of in-state CBO, disagrees with Walker and projects a net positive balance of 56 million for the state by the end of 2011 (read their report here, PDF). Further, the Bureau argues that the state would have had an additional $139.7 million if not for the tax cuts already passed during Walker’s brief administration. Yet further, as recently as February 1st, Walker did not announce his plans on how to pay for those cuts:

...

Walker is exaggerating and fueling the state’s fiscal crisis as an excuse to break unions. Brian Beutler has more on this at TPMDC.

Senate Dems in hiding, not coming back until collective bargaining rights are secured
Greg Sargent was able to talk to one of the Wisconsin Senate Dems:

I just got off the phone with Wisconsin State Senator Chris Larson, one of the Democrats who has left the capitol in order to stall the GOP's plan to roll back the bargaining rights of public employees. Speaking to me by cell phone from an undisclosed location, Larson said he and his fellow Democrats would not return until the GOP takes its assault on organizing rights "off the table."

"Each of us is in a secure location," he told me, confirming that they were not all together but were monitoring events on the Web and on Twitter. Larson refused to say whether he and his fellow Dems had left the state, as some have speculated.

"We're going to be staying away until we hear that they are taking the right to organize seriously," Larson continued, referring to Republicans. "They're going after 50 years of history in one week. Until they take that off the table, it's a non-starter."

MORE

People! Democrats with fucking backbones!!!! Who knew???? Backed up by the third day of rallies in Wisconsin today:



The protestor count varies between 30,000-40,000 [laceblade links to Wiscon Protester blog that quotes the Dept of Administration count of 25,000] and they seem to be gathering steam. [laceblade points out that I misread the paper: And that in the fact of this asshole governor threatening from the time he stepped in Walker wants the National Guard to substitute for any state employee strikes:]Walker says National Guard is prepared

Gov. Scott Walker says the Wisconsin National Guard is prepared to respond wherever is necessary in the wake of his announcement that he wants to take away nearly all collective bargaining rights from state employees.

Walker said Friday that he hasn't called the Guard into action, but he has briefed them and other state agencies in preparation of any problems that could result in a disruption of state services, like staffing at prisons.

Walker says he has every confidence that state employees will continue to show up for work and do their jobs and he's not anticipating any problems.
.MORE

Steve Benen does warn that a similar effort by Texas Dems to stop republican redistricting attempts ended in failure in 2003

Nearly eight years ago, Republicans in the Texas legislature, at the behest of Tom DeLay, tried to force through a re-redistricting scheme. Texas Democrats didn't have the votes to stop, but they had a procedural card to play -- they could not show up, deny the GOP a quorum, and prevent the bill from passing. So Dems packed up and left the state for a while.*

...

* Postscript: In case you're curious, Texas Dems, who mainly fled to Oklahoma and New Mexico, held out for a long while, but eventually had to go home. The re-redistricting scheme passed; five additional U.S. House Republican districts were created; and the financing for the whole scheme led to felony convictions for Tom DeLay.

TPM DC gives us more context: FLASHBACK: Texas Dems Fled State In 2003 To Block GOP Re-Redistricting Plan

Back in May 2003, Republicans in Texas wanted to redo the 2001 redistricting plan to pick up an easy four seats in the House of Representatives. Problem was, just like Fitzgerald and Walker in Wisconsin, they needed a quorum in the legislature to get anything done.

So Texas House Democrats skipped town.

Republicans called out the state troopers and even the Texas Rangers (the ones in law enforcement, not baseball) to hard them back to Austin. But they'd all holed up in a hotel just across the border in Oklahoma, and didn't return until they'd secured a promise that the redistricting plan would be shelved.

That summer, Governor Rick Perry called a special legislative session to renew the fight. For round two, 11 of the state's 12 Democratic senators high-tailed it to Albuquerque for a month, frustrating Texas Republicans once again. The standoff continued until one of them returned to Texas, and the redistricting effort passed.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) masterminded the whole plan to pad his majority in Washington. His meddling turned the whole ordeal into a political minefield. In May, he'd contacted the FAA to help him locate the absentee Texas House Dems -- an illegal action that got him in trouble with the House Ethics Committee. And in late 2005, Justice Department lawyers concluded that the plan violated the Voting Rights Act. They found that Republicans knew the effort would dilute majority-minority districts, yet proceeded anyway to maximize GOP representation in the U.S. House. Nonetheless, senior Justice officials overruled them.

Ultimately the Supreme Court invalidated one of the districts, which forced the state to redraw the lines in accordance with the ruling.MORE

But I don't recall strong protest rallies being held to back them up their so I think if everyone can hold out and go all in, this may be a game changer. There's a lot to lose. If the Repubs succeed with this in Wisconsin, they'll be going after the unions in teh all the states they have control over.


Digby alerts us to the fact that the fucking news is as usual getting the story wrong, the fuckers!

This needs to be sent to every gasbag in DC because they are getting the Wisconsin story very wrong, mostly from interviewing GOP ideologues and listening to uniformed Democrats:

Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.
Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

....I just listened to some Republican legislator say this was all about unaffordable pensions and Matthews featured some footage of Ed Rendell saying basically the same thing. They don't know the facts, and as people are just tuning in to the amazing events in Wisconsin, it would be helpful if they weren't fed a bucket of BS on the subject.

TPM has great coverage of Wisconsin. Read it all. It's very exciting:

Hey Al Jazeera? Can you spare some of your reporters to come cover this stuff over here too? It would be interesting to see just how much the US stations that are now using Al Jazeera to cover the current Crisis in teh Arab World would completely ignore the coverage!


On any case. other states are gearing up for war, starting with Ohio

Goes off to look for solidarity icons!