Late Update: Jessica Arp with the local CBS affiliate reports that the Senate has just passed the bill by a margin of 18-1 — with only moderate Republican Dale Schultz voting no, in absence of the Democrats who had fled the state in order to block budget quorum.
via Wisconsin Conference Committee Passes New, Stripped-Down Anti-Union Bill | TPMDC.
So, Gov. Scott Walker made his move this afternoon and bifurcated the budget bill. Republicans stripped out all collective bargaining provisions from the budget bill in a joint committee this afternoon, then brought only the collective bargaining piece to the Senate floor where it passed with no Democrats present, 18-1.
Please, conservative commenters, be aware that I’m unlikely to tolerate any whining about how the healthcare bill was “rammed down” your itty bitty gullets after seeing this, so don’t even bother with that. Filibusters in the US Senate are broken with compromise. In Wisconsin, not so much.
It’s not democracy. What is it, exactly?
Here’s an answer from Keith Olbermann on what it is: Suicide of the Republican Party
Still having never learned to be calm, retract their claws, and sit around and act rationally in a situation that calls for panic, Wisconsin’s Republicans and their Corporate Puppeteers tonight guaranteed themselves an unprecedented and disastrous recall next January.
More over, they also guaranteed themselves that any cloak of stealth under which they have operated in their attacks on teachers, firefighters, policemen, unions, and the settled law of collective bargaining, has been stripped away. If you pass a supposedly urgent “budget repair” bill with key budget components cut from it, you forfeit the fiction that you are doing anything remedial, anything essential, anything except a naked power grab on behalf of corporations who will get the money stolen from organized labor – civic or private.
And further, when you accomplish all this by parliamentary trick – after your national party has spent two years and more decrying Congressional reconciliation – when you deny the minority the right to participate in the outcome whether by compromise or protest, you cut through the cacophony of political-speak in this country and you transmit your sneering indifference towards democracy to ordinary citizens who do not normally pay attention.
