The standoff in Wisconsin

Wisconsin’s state government remained paralyzed this week over Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to curtail state employees’ collective-bargaining rights. As Democratic legislators continued to block a vote on that bill, more than 70,000 protesters demonstrated outside the capitol, and Walker stood his ground. Walker’s proposal to roll back union benefits and negotiating power—which has sparked a national battle between public-employee unions and Republican officials—did pass the state Assembly, but was stalled in the state Senate because of 14 absent Democrats, who have decamped to neighboring Illinois.

Nonetheless, the governor unveiled a budget that includes union-benefit rollbacks and also cuts more than 21,000 state jobs and slashes $1.5 billion in education spending. “Wisconsin is broke,” Walker said. If Democrats continue to fight his union proposals, he said, it will “lead to more painful and aggressive spending cuts in the very near future.” Similar struggles erupted in Indiana, where Democratic legislators traveled out of state to block a law that weakens organized labor, and in Ohio, where 8,000 pro-labor demonstrators gathered before that state’s Senate passed an anti-collective-bargaining bill of its own.

“Wisconsin’s increasingly radioactive governor” has gone too far, said the Detroit Free Press in an editorial. Our governor here in Michigan is one of many Republicans trying to distance themselves from Walker, especially since a prank caller got Walker to say he’d considered planting troublemakers among the pro-labor demonstrators. That confirmed the unions’ conviction that Walker is leading “a coordinated campaign to delegitimize organized labor.”

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Don’t let the unions change the subject, said Christian Schneider in National Review Online. All their talk about “the sacrosanct concept” of collective bargaining is just “a carapace to protect what they really value”: compulsory union dues. The unions know that Walker’s bid to allow members to stop paying dues automatically through deductions on their state paychecks will hinder their ability “to elect sympathetic lawmakers.” For them, nothing else really counts.

You want to talk about ulterior motives? said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. If this were really only about balancing budgets, Walker wouldn’t be trying to stop same-day voter registration and pass “onerous voter ID laws” to discourage younger voters and the poor. This is “an anti-democratic effort” to lock in the wrongheaded policies of “a temporary conservative majority.” That’s why Wisconsin matters to the whole country.