Wisconsin's Political Speech Raid

Americans learned in the IRS political targeting scandal that government enforcement power can be used to stifle political speech. Something similar may be unfolding in Wisconsin, where a special prosecutor is targeting conservative groups that participated in the battle over Governor Scott Walker's union reforms.

In recent weeks, special prosecutor Francis Schmitz has hit dozens of conservative groups with subpoenas demanding documents related to the 2011 and 2012 campaigns to recall Governor Walker and state legislative leaders.

Copies of two subpoenas we've seen demand "all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications" both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees. The groups include the League of American Voters, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Americans for Prosperity—Wisconsin, American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, Friends of Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

One subpoena also demands "all records of income received, including fundraising information and the identity of persons contributing to the corporation." In other words, tell us who your donors are.

Read the rest here.

Another mass shooting

 A gunman opened fire Sunday morning at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee, killing six people and wounding at least three others, including a police officer, before being shot to death, police said.

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What Wisconsin's vote means

The left will make a big mistake if it ignores the lessons of the failed recall in Wisconsin of Gov. Scott Walker (R). The right will make an even bigger error if it allows the Wisconsin results to feed its inclination toward winner-take-all politics.

The danger on the right is greater because winning an epic fight is a heady experience and conservatives can claim a real victory here. Walker didn’t just win. He won decisively. And it turns out that a majority of Wisconsin voters — including many who voted against Walker — simply didn’t like the idea of a recall.

Read the rest here.

A good article from someone I don't generally agree with.

Wisconsin Governor fends off recall attempt

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) survived a furious recall campaign on Tuesday, emerging as the victor in a bitter fight over state budgets and collective bargaining rights.

NBC News declared Walker the projected winner over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, in the closely-watched campaign, an outgrowth of a contentious fight in early 2011 after Walker drove a bill stripping public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights through Wisconsin's legislature.

Walker's victory served as a symbolic victory for a generation of reform-minded conservatives; the crowd at Walker's Waukesha election night party let out a large cheer when a local NBC affiliate showed the projection of Walker's victory.

Read the rest here.

Good. I don't care for the man's politics but this was an abuse of the recall. The appropriate time to fire a politician whose policies you don't like is in regularly scheduled general elections, not through recalls engineered by big money special interest groups who were offended. A recall should be reserved for corruption or a gross abuse of power. This sort of thing is a slippery slope. Once you start down it no one will ever be able to undertake any kind of controversial policy decisions without having to worry about which special interest with deep pockets is going to try to throw him/her out of office early. That threat has become much more acute with the SCOTUS effectively opening the floodgates to unlimited political contributions by entities that can't vote.

Democratic infighting threatens Wisconsin recall effort

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Democrats organized the protests that gripped the state. They turned Gov. Scott Walker’s plans to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights into a national Democratic cause. They got the signatures they needed to force a recall election, and then some.

They are now just a little more than a month away from the big showdown with Walker they have been craving for over a year — but rather than excitement, there is growing fear within the party that they just might blow it.

Read the rest here.

Wisconsin braces for bitter recall election

There is no question that the unions, led by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union and state’s teachers union, are doing everything they can to oust Walker. But much of the energy behind the recall is homegrown.

Anti-Walker forces needed about 550,000 valid signatures on their petitions to get the recall on the ballot. With the help of 30,000 petition carriers who crisscrossed the state, they collected more than 900,000. Rarely has a political party in a state this size begun a campaign with 900,000 identified supporters — names, addresses and in many cases e-mail addresses. To put that in perspective, Walker got 1.1 million votes when he was elected in 2010.

Read the rest here.

Recall vote opens in Wisconsin

* It’s decision time: After months and months of drama, today the voters have their say in elections to recall six GOP state senators who helped Scott Walker pass his onerous budgeting and anti-union proposals, which triggered a massive backlash that has turned Wisconsin into a dress rehearsal of sorts for 2012 and ground zero in the national war over the future of organized labor.

It will all be decided by turnout, and what’s got both sides nervous, as Dem pollster Mark Mellman told me the other day , is that there’s no precedent of any kind to predict turnout in a slate of six off-year recall elections. Andy Kroll has an eye-opening glimpse into the scope of the Dem/labor turnout operation. And National Review writer Robert Costa says “Republicans are worried” because Dems have energy on their side and are on track to oust GOP state senators Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper, and only need to win one of two races against Alberta Darling and Luther Olsen, both of which remain very close calls, to take back the state senate.

As Chris Bowers rightly notes, the three races that will likely decide the outcome are those to recall Hopper, Darling, and Olsen — and there’s simply no predictive model in existence for the elections that are taking place today.

Whatever ends up happening, Wisconsin Dems and labor have already succeeded in one sense: They reminded us that it’s possible to build a grass roots movement by effectively utilizing the sort of unabashed and bare-knuckled class-based populism that makes many of today’s national Dems queasy. Their effort — whether or not they take back the state senate — could provide a model for a more aggressive, populist approach for national Dems in 2012.

Read the rest here.

Collective Bargaining Law Upheld in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for significant cuts to collective bargaining rights for public workers in the state, undoing a lower court’s decision that Wisconsin’s controversial law had been passed improperly.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, issued at the close of the business day, spared lawmakers in the Republican-dominated Capitol from having to do what some of them strongly hoped to avoid: calling for a new vote on the polarizing collective bargaining measure, which had drawn tens of thousands of protesters to Madison this year and led Democratic lawmakers to flee the city in an effort to block the bill.

Republican leaders had warned on Monday that if the Supreme Court did not rule by Tuesday, they would feel compelled to attach the same measure to the state’s budget bill, which is expected to be approved this week.

The decision ended, at least for now, lingering questions about when and whether the cuts would take effect, but it also underscored the state’s partisan divide, which seems to grow wider by the day. The ruling was 4 to 3, split along what many viewed as the court’s predictable conservative-liberal line. One of the dissenting justices even raised the specter of a “partisan slant” by the other side.

Read the rest here.

Wisconsin Republicans Say Anti-Union Law in Effect

MADISON (Reuters) - Wisconsin Republicans said on Friday a bill stripping Wisconsin public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights was in effect after it was published by a legislative agency despite a judge's order against publication.

The move looked certain to stir fresh controversy over the tactics used in efforts to implement and block the measure, which in recent weeks sparked massive demonstrations and brought national attention to Wisconsin.

Republican supporters of the bill said the judge's temporary restraining order (TRO) on publication had not applied to the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), which published the legislation, Wisconsin Act 10, electronically on Friday.

Legal publication of the legislation is required for it to go into effect.

The restraining order was issued last week by a judge hearing a complaint filed by the Dane County District Attorney against several Republican legislators who orchestrated the law's passage two weeks ago.

Scott Fitzgerald, the head of the GOP-controlled Senate, said the LRB's action made the bill "the law" and insisted the action did not violate the TRO because it did not mention the bureau specifically.

"If the DA didn't want the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish, then the DA should have made sure that they were part of the restraining order."

Read the rest here.

GOP rams anti-union bill through Wis. Senate

MADISON, Wis. — Republicans pushed a provision stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights through the state Senate Wednesday evening after finding a way to bypass the chamber's missing Democrats.

Republican senators separated the provision from Gov. Scott Walker's controversial budget bill, removing the requirement that 20 senators be present for a vote on the anti-union measure.

The vote in the Senate was 18-1. Sen. Dale Schultz was the sole no vote. No Democrats were present.

Spectators in the gallery screamed at the Republicans on the floor, "You are cowards."

All 14 Democrats had left the state for Illinois nearly three weeks ago to prevent passage of the overall budget bill, because it contained the anti-union measure.

The Senate is split 19-14 with Republicans in the majority. Because the union provision was part of a budget bill, Republicans in the Senate needed at least 20 senators present for a quorum.

By separating out the anti-union measure, Republicans did not need 20 senators to allow a vote on that piece.

Read the rest here.

Wisconsin Democrats show signs of capitulation

CHICAGO – Talks appear to have broken down between Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators and representatives of Gov. Scott Walker, whose plan to cut collective bargaining rights and benefits for public workers has created a major battle in the state, some of the Senate Democrats said on Sunday.

Senator Fred Risser, one of 14 Democrats who left Wisconsin last month to prevent the Republican-dominated Senate from approving the collective bargaining measure, said it now seemed conceivable that he and his fellow Democrats would return to Wisconsin, at some point in the future, without a negotiated compromise.

“We have always said we would go back eventually,” Mr. Risser said, adding that the Democrats had yet to make any decision about when to go back to Madison, a move that would open the way for a vote on the proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican elected in November. “We will have accomplished some of our purpose – to slow things up and let people know what was in this bill.”

The Democrats left the state on Feb. 17, the day that a vote was expected on Mr. Walker’s measure in the state Senate. While Republicans control the chamber, they need 20 senators – and, thus, at least one Democrat – to take votes on fiscal matters.

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Wisconsin labor bill advances

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly took the first significant action on their plan to strip collective bargaining rights from most public workers, abruptly passing the measure early Friday morning before sleep-deprived Democrats realized what was happening.

The vote ended three straight days of punishing debate in the Assembly. But the political standoff over the bill — and the monumental protests at the state Capitol against it — appear far from over.

The Assembly's vote sent the bill on to the Senate, but minority Democrats in that house have fled to Illinois to prevent a vote. No one knows when they will return from hiding. Republicans who control the chamber sent state troopers out looking for them at their homes on Thursday, but they turned up nothing.

"I applaud the Democrats in the Assembly for earnestly debating this bill and urge their counterparts in the state Senate to return to work and do the same," Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, said in a statement issued moments after the vote.

The plan from Republican Gov. Scott Walker contains a number of provisions he says are designed to fill the state's $137 million deficit and lay the groundwork for fixing a projected $3.6 billion shortfall in the upcoming 2011-13 budget.

The flashpoint is language that would require public workers to contribute more to their pensions and health insurance and strip them of their right to collectively bargain benefits and work conditions.

Read the rest here.

Wisconsin: Democrats on the lam

MADISON, Wis. — Debate in the State Senate over Wisconsin’s controversial bill to cut collective bargaining rights for public workers ended, at least temporarily, on Thursday morning before it began. As the session was due to begin, Democrats failed to appear in the chamber, leaving the body without a quorum and leading the Republicans to send capitol officials in search of the Democrats.

By noon, Ted Blazel, the sergeant-at-arms, began making his way through the Capitol building, packed with chanting protesters (elated at the development), in search of a Democrat — in offices, under desks, in corridors. “Nothing yet,” he said, his forehead drenched in sweat.

If none of the lawmakers were found in the building, the Wisconsin State Patrol would be assigned to begin searching for them elsewhere, said a Senate official.

Inside the Capitol, speculation swirled: Were the Democrats together somewhere, maybe even in another state by now?

Read the rest here.