Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Utah, didn’t mince words the other day on Hugh Hewitt’s national radio show. The Democrats, he said, “play politics very, very tough, they play it well, and they don’t give a damn about what’s right and what’s wrong.”
He was speaking about battles in Washington, but an even more vivid example can be found in Wisconsin, where the Democrats are still trying to overturn the 2010 elections.
Blindsided last fall by the election of Gov. Scott Walker, the loss of both houses of the legislature and the US Senate seat held by ultraliberal Russ Feingold, the Democrats have simply refused to accept defeat and instead are continuing the fight by any means necessary.
Lawmakers’ weeks-long flight from the state to prevent a vote on Walker’s reformist budget made national news; less well-covered tactics have included recounts and recall petitions as well as threats and intimidation.
Never mind that Walker’s limits on the public-employees unions’ collective-bargaining privileges were rather modest. Federal unions have never had rights like Wisconsin’s; other states, including Indiana, have adopted similar limits without a hint of the sky then falling.
Even Massachusetts is considering restricting municipal unions’ collective-bargaining rights on health benefits to save cash-strapped cities and towns an estimated $100 million in the coming fiscal year.
The bill has passed one house of the Legislature and is pending in the other. Union officials in the Bay State are fuming, as but so far there have been no mass sit-ins, no occupation of the State House, no death threats against the legislators.
Massachusetts, you see, is a wholly owned Democratic Party subsidiary — so there’s no war if they seek something that’s so outrageous when sought by Republicans.
Back in Wisconsin, the state attorney general’s office last week released documents and audio recordings of some 70 threats against state officials.
Among the most outrageous was an e-mail allegedly from schoolteacher Katherine Windels, which read: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell.” She’s been charged with two felony counts, including a bomb threat.
The controversial collective-bargaining law itself is in limbo, thanks to a restraining order issued in March by a judge in Dane County, where Madison is located. The ludicrous grounds: a claim that Republicans didn’t give the public “proper notice” for a March 9 meeting that cleared the way for the bill’s passage.
The state Supreme Court has set oral arguments on Walker’s appeal of that ruling for June 6.
In a plain bid to wire that court, liberal JoAnne Kloppenburg challenged incumbent Justice David Prosser earlier this year. When she lost, she requested a recount, which thus far has cost state taxpayers nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The recount, which with all but one county reporting hasn’t come close to
overturning the result, is to finish May 26.
But even that won’t be an end: Kloppenburg has said she’d likely to go court to challenge the election’s legality.
As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel opined: “This is no way to run an election.”
Yet the Battle of Wisconsin’s likely to look like a game of beanbag compared with what’s coming nationally, as our nation’s parlous fiscal condition forces as a desperate debate over the country’s fundamental nature. Expect the Democrats to grab any tool in their kit and use it early and often against even common-sense Republican reform or pushback. And they call the Tea Party the radicals.
As Hatch noted, Democrats in Washington are already using their power ruthlessly, from last week’s show-trial hearings with the oil executives to the National Labor Relations Board’s diktat that Boeing can’t create new jobs in Dreamliner production in right-to-work South Carolina, but only in unionized Washington state.
Hatch is right. And with the nation’s future at stake, the GOP had better start acting accordingly.