Ronald Brownstein wrote recently that Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin offered a false choice by engaging public sector unions in a battle over collective bargaining privileges.
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker this week won a war of choice. But his victory doesn’t erase the question of whether he needed to wage the war at all. Or whether this kind of scorched-earth political combat offers the best model for resolving the comparable challenges awaiting the next president, as some may now insist.
Walker faced a genuine challenge when he arrived in office in 2011: a $3.5 billion state budget deficit swelled by the sustained economic downturn. But he responded with a consciously confrontational solution that ignited two years of unprecedented and unstinting partisan conflict. The fact that Walker’s opponents responded with excesses of their own (including, arguably, the recall election itself), or that he’s left standing after the last shot has been fired (at least until 2014), shouldn’t be confused with proof that he was wise to initiate these hostilities. Victory in an unnecessary battle isn’t really a victory at all; ask the generals at Verdun.
Brownstein complains that all parties in Wisconsin did not share equally in the sacrifice to balance the state budget. The unions gave up more than anybody else and therefore Walker's solution was unfair and divisive.
[H]e refused to balance the cuts for union members (and the local school boards facing a sharp reduction in state aid) with higher tax contributions from the affluent or corporations. Then, he threw gasoline on the fire by deciding not to negotiate givebacks directly with the public-employee unions (which they had signaled they would accept), but to strip them of their rights to collectively bargain on those issues altogether.
Since then, Wisconsin has lived through tumultuous protests and occupations in the state Capitol and two rounds of bitter, astronomically expensive recall elections that culminated in this week’s voting that sustained Walker but apparently flipped control of the state Senate to the Democrats. The climate has been so toxic that in a Marquette University poll conducted just before the vote, one-third of Wisconsin adults said they have stopped talking politics with someone because of their disagreements over Walker.
In both parties, many activists will say Walker’s survival proves that in this polarized era, the only way to achieve effective change is to ruthlessly unify your own party, concede nothing to the other party (or its constituencies), and bulldoze forward as long as you can hold support from 50-plus-1 percent of the voters.
Brownstein never questions whether it was fair for public sector unions to have those collective bargaining privileges to begin with. Was it fair that government employees could not choose whether or not to join the union? Membership was a condition of their employment, and union dues were automatically deducted from paychecks. How fair was that? It turns out there was another poll that more accurately gauged public sentiment.
According to the Journal, when Walker first proposed his fiscal reforms in early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at a healthy 62,818. By February 2012, the labor behemoth had shrunk to 28,745. “It’s a profound shift,” says George Lightbourn, the president of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the state’s former secretary of administration.
The loss of 34,073 Wisconsin AFSCME members speaks volumes. That's more than 54% of union members who simply left the union because of Governor Walker's reforms. What does that tell you about fairness?
It's not about fairness, it's about the money. Here's what 34,073 individual ideas of fairness mean when measured in dollars and cents. Using a conservative $35 per month for union dues, it means a loss of over $1.4 million annually for AFSCME in Wisconsin.
LIberal partisans, as Brownstein appears to be, argue that this places the Democratic party at an unfair disadvantage when you look at the Republican party's fund raising abilities. But wouldn't it be nice if the Democratic party could attract funding on the strength of its platform. It can't. It rationalizes instead. It invents issues by, for example, forcing Catholic organizations to fund insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortificents, then declaring that there is a war on women when the church objects.
The real fairness issue concerns union members and taxpayers who have been forced to support a political party whose positions they don't agree with. Fifty-four percent of Wisconsin's AFSCME membership have just said what is fair. Fair is being allowed to hang onto your own money and to support unions and political parties, or not, as you see fit.
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