The Left's Illegal Actions In Wisconsin

I last wrote about the standoff between Republican legislators and Governor Scott Walker, and the teachers' union in Wisconsin, in this post a few days ago. Since then, some additional information has surfaced which suggests how the debacle may be resolved.


First, something that the liberal media treats as normal, is the fact that thousands of Wisconsin teachers simply walked off of their jobs to go to Madison to protest. It's behavior which would get an ordinary employee terminated.


Second, doctors from, I believe, the University of Wisconsin, or some other state-affiliated organization, were out among the picketing teachers dispensing fraudulent sick notes. At least one Fox News reporter posed as a teacher and acquired a bogus excuse. This is fraud, apparently by state-paid doctors, to abet an illegal strike by teachers.


Don't you just love municipal unions and their employees? How they abide by no-strike aspects of legislation allowing their existence? This is precisely why LaGuardia and FDR refused to allow public sector workers to unionize and bargain collectively.


Third, the Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois are guilty of two things. They would seem to be derelict in their legislative duties, and subject to some penalty. By some press accounts, there are Wisconsin citizens calling for these senators to be recalled immediately.


However, these state senators are guilty of something actually far worse. It was the subject of a heated debate between Steve Hayes, Charles Krauthammer and Juan Williams on Brett Baier's Fox News program on Monday evening. The debate got so out of hand that it ate up time for another topic Baier had planned to discuss.


What was debated is how these state senators, being in the minority and unable to legally stop an all-Republican-controlled lower house, upper house and governorship from repealing collective bargaining rights for teachers, simply fled the state to prevent a quorum in the state senate. Hayes and Krauthammer noted that, during Congress' efforts to pass Wonderboy's health care bill, the president told Paul Ryan, at a private meeting, that he, Wonderboy, had won the presidential election, so his way was the only way forward.


Having set the national tone as governing at will when in complete, total majority throughout the necessary legislative houses and executive branch, this would be fitting for Wisconsin. This is what Krauthammer and Hayes contended.


Williams, ever the left-leaning apologist, denied this, defending the fugitive Wisconsin state senators as practicing democracy. He heatedly denied that they were violating the political process. He referred to it as 'playing politics,' and Hayes retorted with something like,


'That's not playing politics, Juan. That's taking the ball and going home.'


It's not a small point. In Wisconsin, as in the rest of the US, November's elections settled the public debate. The losers, in this case, the Democrats in Wisconsin, must abide by the will of the elected majority. Just like Congress' Republicans had to endure the tortured process by which the health care bill was passed.


Despite the signs and cries of the picketing Wisconsin teachers and their allies, Scott Walker is not behaving like Hitler, nor engaging in unrepresentative, undemocratic behavior. To follow Wonderboy's lead, the GOP in that state won control of both legislative houses and the governor's office, so they may now repeal the teachers' union's collective bargaining rights.


Isn't that the inspiring lesson of Wonderboy's remark to Paul Ryan- ironically, from Wisconsin- shortly after his inauguration? That since he'd won the November election, and Democrats controlled Congress, it was his way, or the highway? No Republicans need offer any amendments to anything?


What Democrat state senators and teachers are doing in Wisconsin is certainly not the democratic process. It's two groups of liberals behaving illegally because they lost power in a proper election, and now are seeing special benefits stripped by lawmakers representing the rest of the state's citizenry.


It seems to me that public sector collective bargaining is in no way a God-given right. What the legislature granted earlier, in the last century, it can take away. Almost half of US states do not allow this right for public employees.


Further, the left has created what is, for itself and those unions, a virtuous cycle. The public sector unions use union dues, deducted and paid to them by the state, to fund liberal candidates who then vote for better compensation and benefits for the union employees.


In Wisconsin, as governor Scott Walker has explained, this has led to below average payments by teachers for their pensions and health care benefits. Do you think this would have occurred if those workers weren't allowed to bargain collectively?


Probably not.


In short, the union and its employees, in concert with Democratic state officials over decades, finally looted too much money from the rest of the state's citizens. Those citizens gave Walker the governorship, and his party control of both legislative houses last November.


That was the will of the people, expressed at the ballot box. What teachers and Democratic state senators are doing now is whining and throwing a tantrum, now that they've been told things will change.


As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Ohio and Indiana are now grappling with similar issues. It's a great time for the left and its public sector unions to be acting out in such a public and undemocratic manner.


If Wonderboy were smart, instead of accusing Scott Walker of union busting, he'd be calling on his party's members to buck up, take their medicine, and encourage teachers to behave legally and responsibly. Instead, his silence will come back to haunt the First Rookie in the 2012 election.