Unintimidated

by Scott Walker

  Giffords’s home-state colleague, U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva, declared, “[When] you stoke these flames, and you go to public meetings and you scream at the elected officials, you threaten them—you make us expendable you make us part of the cannon fodder. . . . Something’s going to happen.”3

  Well, just a few weeks later, when protesters screamed at elected officials, threatened them, and created a “climate of hate” in Madison, their actions were met with silence from these same quarters. Protesters followed us around the state, assaulted police vehicles, harassed Republican legislators, and vandalized their homes. One day, someone scattered dozens of .22 caliber bullets across the capitol grounds.

  At the capitol, they carried signs comparing me to Adolf Hitler, Hosni Mubarak, and Osama bin Laden. Those never seemed to make the evening news, so we took pictures to document them. One read “Death to tyrants.” Another had a picture of me in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.” Another declared, “The only good Republican is a dead Republican.” Another said “Walker = Hitler” and “Repubs = Nazi Party.”

  It wasn’t just the protesters who engaged in such shameful rhetoric. Democratic Senator Lena Taylor also compared me to Hitler, declaring, “The history of Hitler, in 1933, he abolished unions, and that’s what our governor’s doing today.”4, 5 Her colleague Senator Spencer Coggs called our plan “legalized slavery.”6 Jesse Jackson came to Madison and compared me to the late segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace (who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt), declaring we had “the same position” and that I was practicing the politics of the “Old South.”7

  Later, when the capitol was cleared of protesters, Time magazine reported, “The Wisconsin State Capitol had taken on an eerie quiet by late Friday. . . . The chalk outlines around fake dead bodies etched with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s name remained in dismembered parts, not yet completely washed away by hoses.”8

  Krugman and his cohorts never got around to taking “a stand against the hate-mongers” in Madison.

  In his moving speech after the Giffords shooting, President Obama declared, “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that—that heals, not in a way that wounds.”9

  Those words apparently fell on deaf ears in Madison.

  CHAPTER 8

  Occupy Madison

  On Tuesday, February 15, the Joint Finance Committee took up our bill in what became the longest budget hearing in the history of the Wisconsin State Legislature. The hearing would soon claim a more ignominious place in history—as the moment that gave birth to the “Occupy” movement.

  There is an informal tradition in Wisconsin that when a committee is taking testimony from the public, members stay and listen until the last person has spoken. Opponents of Act 10 abused that tradition to conduct what one of them called a “citizen’s filibuster.”

  Using social media, the unions put out a call for people to come to the capitol and testify. They turned out more people than had ever been seen at a bill hearing. There were lines winding down the stairs. So long as people lined up to testify, the committee could not move the bill. Students and teaching assistants came streaming up State Street from the University of Wisconsin campus into the capitol, where they filled out cards requesting their chance to deliver three minutes of testimony. They were joined by teachers and other public workers who lined up outside the hearing room by the hundreds waiting for the chance to speak.

  To accommodate the growing throng, the capitol staff decided to set up several big-screen televisions in the rotunda so the overflow crowds could follow the proceedings.

  That was the first mistake.

  The second mistake came at three a.m. After hearing seventeen straight hours of testimony, committee cochair Representative Robin Vos decided that was enough. He gaveled the hearing to a close. An uproar ensued. Hundreds of people were still waiting in line to have their say.

  The assembly sergeant at arms came over and informed Vos that the Democrats wanted to continue the hearing. Vos threw up his hands and said, “I’m exhausted, they can do whatever they want, but the hearing’s not going to be official. They can go sit in a room if they want to and listen to people, but that doesn’t matter to me.”1

  The Democrats moved to a new hearing room and continued to hear “testimony” throughout the night and into the morning. Instead of clearing out the crowds camped out in the rotunda (as they normally would once a late hearing had ended), the police let them stay. And once the protesters had spent one night in the capitol, they figured they could do it again the next night . . . and the next . . . and the next. They never left.

  The occupation had begun.

  Vos said later, “We probably never should have allowed them to continue in there. We should have cleared the capitol and started up the next day.” We were not equipped to handle what was coming next.

  The following day, February 16, more people showed up and joined the camp that was forming in the rotunda. The ranks of the occupiers grew with each passing day. While protesters chanted “Kill the bill!” outside my office, I remarked to reporters gathered inside, “Everyone has a right to be heard.”

  When the protests began, the folks in the capitol were teachers and public employees who were scared and concerned about the changes we had proposed. They brought their families out, and behaved civilly. These were decent citizens, respected in their communities.

  But as the protests went on, the ranks of those marching against our reform became more and more radical with each passing day. Instead of regular citizens camping out waiting to testify against our bill, people from outside Wisconsin began to take over. Soon, national union organizers were bringing in groups with insignia from Chicago, Washington, New York, and plenty of other locations across the country.

  The signs at the capitol became more radical too, comparing us to Nazis, rapists, and terrorists. Some of the protesters wore Che Guevara T-shirts, bearing the visage of the murderous communist revolutionary (an odd choice of clothing when you’re chanting “This is what democracy looks like!”).

  Day after day, the crowds got bigger. A few days before, I had joined more than fifty thousand people at Lambeau Field to celebrate the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl victory. Soon, nearly twice that number would descend on the capitol building and the square outside. The unions brought homeless people into the capitol to help fill it. The weather was freezing, so living in the rotunda was better than sleeping on a grate outside. The capitol grew so packed with human bodies, the staff who worked there physically could not move around the building. There was no possible way to clean it because the bodies never left. The smell, as soon as you walked into the building, was overpowering.

  Protesters urinated on the back door of my office.

  Charles Quagliana, a historical architect who participated in the 2004 renovation of the capitol, later surveyed the damage and concluded that “the building experienced three to five years of wear within a two-week period.”2

  The protesters set up a commune inside the capitol. They had a first aid station, information centers, water stations, a yoga studio, and a designated child care area. People could literally drop off their kids and go scream and chant outside my office. They set up makeshift food service areas where they cooked meals for the crowds in Crock-Pots plugged in with extension cords. (It was a fire hazard, so eventually we cut off the power to discourage them.) They organized a sleeping bag exchange, and tent villages were set up in the rotunda and other corners of the building.

  The capitol was littered with boxes from a small pizza shop across Capitol Square, Ian’s Pizza.3 People from all fifty states and some twe
nty-four countries—including Bosnia, China, Egypt, and France—were calling in and sending thousands of dollars’ worth of pizzas over to the protesters in the capitol each day. Smart entrepreneurs that they were, the folks at Ian’s more than doubled their staff, and even set up an app to take the growing volume of pizza orders online and with mobile devices. Today, that small shop has turned into a virtual Taj Mahal of pizza.4 With Act 10, it seemed, we were bringing a lot of tourism dollars into the state. The only industry we didn’t seem to be helping was the hotel industry—because so many people were sleeping inside the capitol.

  The media liked to comment on how “peaceful” the protests were. They must never have tried to get around the capitol in a suit and tie. Since the Democratic legislators were all wearing orange union shirts, anyone in a suit was assumed to be a Republican and accosted.

  One day, Ed Wall, the head of the Justice Department’s Division of Criminal Investigation, came to my office and shared what had just happened when he walked into the capitol wearing a suit. Protesters started rushing after him yelling “Get him! Get him!” One guy was screaming in his face, yelling “Who are you?” When he barked back at him “I’m a cop!” the guy turned around to the crowd and said, “It’s OK, he’s a cop!” They thought the police were on their side, so they all backed away. Little did they know, Ed was helping us. From that moment on, Ed said, he was golden. Whenever he walked through the capitol with his badge hanging on his suit pocket, they all said, “How are you, officer?”

  Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen was not so lucky. One day, he tried to get to his car parked just outside the capitol building. Protesters swarmed around him, spitting and cursing at him. It took a dozen police officers to finally clear the way for him to depart. He soon began parking across the street at the Risser Justice Center and using the underground tunnels like me.5

  Republican senator Glenn Grothman was actually chased outside the capitol and cornered by an angry mob of AFSCME, UFCW, and SEIU activists, yelling “Shame! Shame!” and “F——— you!” in unison. He had to be rescued by a Democratic state lawmaker, Representative Brett Hulsey, who prevailed on the mob to let the senator go. The entire incident was caught on video.6

  Inside the capitol, the protesters tried to physically disrupt legislators from carrying out their constitutional duties by clogging corridors and stairwells and denying them access to the senate and assembly chambers. They used social media to mobilize people in these efforts, sending out tweets with requests like “Calling for people to block stairs to the senate” and “We need to prevent the senate from attaining a quorum.”7

  On February 17, the senate was scheduled to convene at eleven a.m. to take up the bill. But instead of coming to the chamber, minority leader Senator Mark Miller had called a meeting of all his senators at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin headquarters. They had figured out a way to block the bill.

  Article VIII, Section 8, of the state constitution reads:

  [A]ny law which imposes, continues or renews a tax, or creates a debt or charge, or makes, continues or renews an appropriation of public or trust money . . . three-fifths of all the members elected to such house shall in all such cases be required to constitute a quorum therein.

  That meant that twenty senators had to be present to pass the bill. There were only nineteen Republicans. So if all the Democrats left the state, the senate could not move forward.

  They decided to leave.

  Only thirteen Democrats were at the meeting. The other senator, Tim Cullen, was away from the capitol consoling the family of his good friend former Wisconsin supreme court justice Bill Bablitch, who had just passed away. Cullen then headed to the capitol to brief reporters on Bablitch’s passing. When I called Senator Cullen a few days later, he told me that he thought he could have convinced them not to leave if he had been at that meeting.

  Around 11:30 a.m., when the senators were called to the chamber, the Democrats were nowhere to be found. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald went to the minority leader’s office to ask where Senator Miller was, but his staff said they did not know.

  Meanwhile, Senator Ellis went through the motions of calling the roll. When the Democrats did not respond, he declared, “The clerk will keep the roll open for Senator Miller and the other senators who are not here yet.”

  A few moments later assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald got a call from his brother.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Scott said, “but I think the Democrats have left the state.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Jeff replied.

  Soon, Scott called again.

  “Yeah, they’re gone. We don’t have a quorum so we can’t move the bill.”

  On her Facebook page, Democratic Senator Lena Taylor posted a message that read “brb” (“be right back”).8 Initially, in our own naïveté, we believed that they would be. And besides, we figured, if the Democrats did not return, all we had to do was send the state troopers out to bring them back. We soon learned that state troopers had no authority to do that. And even if they had had the authority, the sight of state troopers marching senators back to the capitol was one none of us wanted to see.

  Very quickly, we figured out how to pass the bill without them. We did not need the Democratic senators to be present if we split the bill—removing the fiscal provisions that required a quorum, and passing the collective bargaining reforms alone. But the senate Republicans were concerned about doing that. They didn’t want to send the message that the bill was about breaking the unions instead of balancing the budget. And besides, they were convinced that the senate Democrats would be back in a few days’ time.

  So they let the standoff go on and the protests build. What should have been a delay of one or two days turned into a multiweek saga. It was an entirely self-inflicted wound. We kept telling senate Republicans they could end this anytime. But they kept thinking that with a few days and a few concessions, their Democratic colleagues would return. It took them more than three weeks of building protests and failed shuttle diplomacy before they finally realized that the Democrats were never coming back.

  There was another reason for the lack of urgency on the Republican side. Despite the building protests, we were winning the battle for public opinion.

  The senate Democrats had fled to defend the indefensible: the right of most public workers to pay nothing for their pensions and next to nothing for their health insurance premiums.

  That was pretty hard to explain to the rest of the state when many workers in Wisconsin had lost their jobs or seen their hours and their benefits pared back in the midst of the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out,9 in the private sector the average employee paid 20 percent of their health care premium, and contributed about 7.5 percent of their take-home pay for retirement. We were asking public workers to pay just 12.6 percent toward their health care premiums and 5.8 percent toward their retirement—far below the national average.

  In other words, the Democrats’ position didn’t make sense to most people in Wisconsin. My brother, David, was a good example. He works as a hotel banquet manager and a part-time bartender. His wife, my sister-in-law, Maria, sells appliances at a department store. They have two beautiful girls, my nieces, Isabella and Eva. They are a typical middle-class family in Wisconsin.

  He reminded me that he pays about $800 a month toward his health insurance premiums and the little bit he can put away for his retirement. He said that workers like him would love to have the type of benefits we were offering to public employees.

  David told me that when the protests first started in Madison, a few people at his church who were government workers expressed their displeasure with my reforms. He said that they initially got some sympathy. But then, the more they talked about it, the more people were shocked to learn just how little they paid for their pensions and health care,
and the sympathy ran dry. Eventually they stopped talking about it at church.

  It was like that all over Wisconsin. The New York Times published a story about how private sector workers in Wisconsin were “finding it hard to feel sympathy or offer solidarity, with their own jobs lost and their benefits and pensions cut back or cut off,” adding that “away from Madison, many people said that public workers needed to share in the sacrifice that their own families have been forced to make.”10 Even liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson conceded: “Walker is right about one thing: When it comes to pensions and benefits, public workers in Wisconsin have a sweet deal. . . . It’s easy to see why the average private-sector worker in Wisconsin—probably paying upward of 25 percent toward health insurance costs and struggling to tuck away something, anything, for retirement—might agree with Walker.”

  Our internal polls confirmed this. By a margin of 77 to 21, Wisconsin voters agreed that “when it comes to pensions and benefits, state employees have a pretty sweet deal . . . it is time the average government worker paid a little more.”

  It didn’t help the unions’ cause that while people were learning about what cushy benefits teachers and government employees enjoyed, classrooms across the state were empty because tens of thousands of teachers were at the capitol protesting. In Madison, 40 percent of all teachers called in sick11—which meant either that Madison schools had been hit by one of the largest epidemics in Wisconsin history, or teachers were abusing sick leave to protest.

  It is illegal under Wisconsin law for teachers and government workers to go on strike, but many teachers effectively went on strike anyway. So many called in sick that schools from Milwaukee and Madison to Racine and Beaver Dam had to close for days at a time.