It was supposed to be delicious payback.
The public sector unions had a great thing going in Wisconsin until those evil Republicans came along. The public sector union members were getting paid at a rate astronomically higher than their private sector counterparts and were getting the most generous publicly-financed health and retirement benefits imaginable. In exchange, they would take a portion of the money siphoned from the taxpayers and funnel it back to the leftist Democrat politicians who gave them such generous pay and benefits in the form of political contributions.
The unions win. The Democrats win. Everyone wins – except the taxpayers who were left with multi-million-dollar deficits.
So, the taxpayers of Wisconsin, assuming that they lived in a representative democracy, elected a Republican governor and Republican majorities in the legislature to end this scheme.
The Republicans then did exactly what they were elected to do: They passed legislation placing some limits on the public sector unions to end the money-laundering cycle that had been feeding those unions and their leftist Democrat benefactors at the expense of the people of Wisconsin.
But leftists do not go gentle into any good night. Rather than see the will of the people enacted into law, the Democrats in the Senate left the state and refused to return for weeks on end. And they sent into the state hundreds of leftist activists to do millions of dollars of damage to the state capitol as they rioted in the streets. You see, leftists may call themselves “Democrats,” but they do not believe in democracy if the result is contrary to their leftist interests.
The Democrat senators remained out of state until the Republicans figured out how to pass their legislation despite the Democrats’ absence. Then, the Democrats returned in defeat.
But, they said, they had won a “moral victory” because surely the people were outraged by the Republicans who’d had the audacity to pass legislation that they had been elected to pass. And so the unions declared that they would recall enough Republicans to regain control of the Senate.
And so they went to work on their ultimate payback scheme, and they managed to get six Republicans onto the ballot for recall. And the national unions pumped millions upon millions of dollars into Wisconsin to flood the airways with attack ads. If they could win four of the six seats, they would regain the majority. Surely the people of Wisconsin would rally to their leftist cause.
The recall election was held yesterday, and the Democrats won just two of the six elections. And neither of those two recalls was a response to the Republicans’ legislation placing limits on public sector unions. One of the defeated Republicans represented an overwhelmingly Democrat district that had gone for Barack Obama by a nearly 2:1 margin, and that Republican therefore would have lost the next election anyway. The other was mired in personal scandal, having left the district for an extramarital affair. His own wife (understandably) had endorsed the Democrat.
Oh, and next week, two Democrats are up for recall, which means that even this two-seat gain by the Democrats may be trimmed or eliminated.
So, in the end, the national unions spent millions of dollars to try to overturn the will of the Wisconsin electorate as revenge for what they characterized as “union-busting” by Republicans. But that electorate had other plans, and it was the unions themselves that came up with a big bust.
