Unintimidated

by Scott Walker

  When I arrived, the room erupted. It was an emotional meeting. I explained to the members of our caucus that “every one of us who’s ever sought public office wonders, in the back of our minds: Will our term in office really make a difference? Will we have a lasting impact for the good of the people of your state? In the totality of our careers, whether we’ve been here one term or twenty terms, what will our impact be?

  “This is one of those moments where you can do something that will fundamentally change the course of history and the State of Wisconsin for the better of the taxpayers,” I continued. “For those of you who are new, you’re fortunate to be having this opportunity right off the bat. For those of you who have been here for many years, this might be the high point of your legislative accomplishments. . . . But,” I said, “we have a chance to do something that will change the course of history in our state.” I knew how hard this vote was and the pressures they were all feeling. “If there was ever a moment you could pull deep within your reservoir of courage, this is that time. This is that moment.”

  There was long, sustained applause. After I left, several legislators got up to speak. A first-term lawmaker from a heavy union town, Representative Joe Knilans, told his colleagues, “I just want to say that taking this vote today will probably cost me my job. But that’s why I came to Madison—to take votes like this. I never wanted to be a career politician—it’s about doing the right thing.”3

  Then, the longest serving Republican in the assembly, Representative Al Ott, asked everyone to pray. For about fifteen minutes, everyone held hands and asked God to give them guidance and to protect their families. Later, Robin Vos said that after that experience, “there was nothing that the other side could do that would make this group of people not pass the bill.”

  After the caucus meeting, the Republicans proceeded into the assembly chamber, with the crowds of protesters chanting and stomping their feet outside. It was like entering the Thunderdome. The debate lasted more than sixty-one hours. By the time it ended, the legislators had become virtually incoherent from exhaustion. The Democrats had offered 128 amendments but were demanding time to debate and vote on 40 more. After two and a half days of nonstop debate, Speaker Fitzgerald took the floor and said, “This is the longest in the history of the state assembly that a bill has ever been debated. In the end, you know we’re going to have to take this vote.” After allowing the debate to go on a few more hours, Republicans finally offered a motion to send the bill to the senate and adjourn. It was Friday at 1:06 a.m. when the assembly finally voted. The bill was approved by a voice vote.

  As the vote was called, the assembly Democrats exploded—yelling, screaming, throwing water, cups, and paper at their Republican colleagues. Robin Vos said the fracas on the assembly floor got so bad “it was impossible to tell a protester apart from a legislator.” At one point, Democratic representative Gordon Hintz turned to his Republican colleague Representative Michelle Litjens on the assembly floor and said: “You’re F———ing dead!”4 He later apologized for the comment,5 but it illustrated how heated and uncivil the debate had become.

  All the critics who charged that we rammed collective bargaining reform through without notice or debate seem to forget about the time two years earlier when Governor Doyle rammed a budget repair bill that raised taxes by more than a billion dollars through both houses in twenty-four hours—without a public hearing. By contrast, Republicans held a record sixty-one hours and fifteen minutes of debate on our bill in the assembly alone. (Not to mention a record seventeen-hour committee hearing before that.)

  After the vote, I praised the Republican leadership for its action, adding that “assembly Democrats should also be commended for coming to work every day and giving their constituents a voice at the state capitol.” Now, I said, “all attention is on the senate. The fourteen senate Democrats need to come home and do their jobs, just like the assembly Democrats did.”

  That was not happening anytime soon. With the Democrats hiding out in Illinois, we could not move forward. The senate Republicans were paralyzed because they did not want to split the bill. Meanwhile, the unions had shifted the debate, and public opinion, in their favor. If the senate had just acted, it would have been over and saved us weeks of grief.

  Instead, we were stuck.

  CHAPTER 14

  “1 Walker Beats 14 Runners”

  The Saturday after the assembly passed the bill, we saw the largest crowds yet gather at the capitol—an estimated seventy thousand people. Those calling in “sick” from work during the week had been joined by others who had a legitimate day off on Saturday.

  Tea Party groups organized a counterprotest that day. I was grateful for their support, but having seen how some of the union protesters accosted Republican legislators and officials, I worried how they might respond to a sizable contingent of conservatives. I spent much of that day praying for the safety of folks on both sides, and asking my staff for regular updates. Thankfully, while there was some yelling back and forth, nothing happened.

  The following weekend, I was supposed to attend the National Governors Association meeting at the White House, but with fourteen Democratic senators hiding out in Illinois, I didn’t think I should travel to Washington, D.C. So Tonette went in my place, and instead I flew into the legislative districts of some of the more vulnerable Democratic senators to deliver a message: “These senators need to come home and do their jobs.”

  We traveled to Kenosha, Green Bay, Rhinelander, La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Superior, and were greeted by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of protesters at every stop.

  As the public fight over Act 10 heated up, behind the scenes we had begun discussions with the senate Democrats in an effort to end the impasse and bring them home.

  Our intermediary with the fourteen Democrats was Senator Tim Cullen. Cullen had been senate majority leader in the 1980s until he left the senate and crossed the aisle to join Governor Tommy Thompson’s cabinet. He was highly regarded by both Republicans and Democrats, and prided himself on the fact that the last time a bipartisan budget had passed the senate was under his leadership. He saw himself as someone who could bring people together and get things done. Cullen had made his fortune in business before returning to public service in 2011. He didn’t need the job. He had nothing to prove.

  When the Democrats left, Cullen was not in Madison because his dear friend, former Wisconsin supreme court justice Bill Bablitch, had just passed away. Cullen had gone to console the family. I reached him on his cell phone to offer my condolences. He had joined his fellow Democrats in the Land of Lincoln but told me that if he had been there, he thought he could have persuaded them not to leave because it was a stupid idea. He said, “Give me a little time, we’ll work this out.”

  Another Democrat who wanted to return was Senator Bob Jauch. Jauch is no centrist, but he loves the senate and saw the standoff as a taint on the institution. Together, Cullen and Jauch led a quiet effort to bring the Democrats back to Madison.

  The problem was that the rest of the Democratic caucus had no interest in coming back. Most of the senators were from liberal enclaves, so their constituents didn’t want them to return. Moreover, for many of them this was the biggest thing they had done in their lives. They had become folk heroes on the left—hailed by the protesters and interviewed on MSNBC almost every night. They kept hearing reports from the unions about how big the capitol protests were growing, and became increasingly convinced that, sooner or later, our side would have no choice but to fold.

  What they did not realize was that the protests were having the opposite effect on their Republican colleagues back in Madison. It was next to impossible to get into and out of the capitol. Every day that the senators came to work, they were yelled at and cussed at and spit on and subjected to barbs and invective. The protesters followed them everywhere, picketing their homes and harassing their families. The longer the protests wen
t on, and the nastier they became, the more the Republican senators’ patience ran thin and their resolve stiffened. They became less concerned about losing their seats and more concerned about not giving in to organized intimidation. Instead of breaking them apart, the protests brought them closer together. The more the protesters tried to intimidate them, the more the senate Republicans locked arms and decided they would not be bullied.

  It quickly became clear to us that the unions were calling the shots, and that their only interest in talking to us was to buy time. One day Keith Gilkes got a phone call from Mick Foti, the former majority leader of the state assembly. Mick told Keith that AFSCME had approached him and wanted to put him on retainer to negotiate with us. Mick said he told the union leaders he didn’t think it was likely he could cut a deal.

  But the union leaders told Mick they didn’t need them to cut a deal; they just wanted him to buy them two more weeks of time.

  The episode underscored for us two facts: First, the unions were directing this from the beginning, and were not interested in compromise; and second, they were simply looking to buy time to build pressure on us so that we would cave.

  At one point, Senator Cullen got so frustrated he told me that he was coming back to Madison on his own. I urged him to make sure he let us know when he was coming so we could provide security. He was shocked. “Why would I need security?” he asked. Because, I explained, they would tar and feather him if he tried to enter the capitol to be the lone Democrat who gave us the quorum to pass the bill.

  He clearly had no idea what was going on back in Madison.

  A former adviser to Governor Thompson named Jerry Whitburn, who had served in the governor’s cabinet with Cullen, was working behind the scenes to get both sides to the negotiating table. He arranged a phone call between Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Minority Leader Mark Miller that had not gone well. But he did not give up. At his urging, on Sunday, February 27, Fitzgerald called Cullen and they agreed to meet the next day at a McDonald’s off the interstate, just inside the Wisconsin border in Kenosha.

  On Monday, Fitzgerald went down to Kenosha to meet with Cullen and Jauch to see if a deal was possible. He asked them point-blank if the labor unions were not going to allow them to come back to the state. They insisted that they could come back anytime. He told them he would not amend the bill now that it had passed the assembly, but that he would convey their negotiating positions to us. When Scott returned, he briefed us on their discussions and told us it was up to us to decide whether to continue them.

  So on Thursday, March 2, I sent Keith and the deputy chief of staff Eric Schutt to sit down with Cullen and Jauch. They met at the same McDonald’s near the border. They were joined this time by Senator Mark Miller, who in the coming week would do everything in his power to undermine our talks.

  Eric told them, “We’re here to negotiate in good faith. Where are you guys at?” Cullen and Jauch presented a list of proposed changes to the bill. After listening to the four of them go back and forth for some time, Miller finally spoke up.

  “You guys have misplayed your hand,” Miller said. “The governor is in real trouble. He’s got real problems out there. The people of the state have turned against him.”

  Miller had not come to negotiate. He had come to accept our surrender. His message was: Anytime you are ready to cry “uncle” we’ll just forget the whole thing and come home.

  Miller wasn’t entirely wrong about our situation. A poll that week from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute showed that by a margin of 65 to 33 percent, voters wanted us to compromise with Democrats and opposed stripping public employees of collective bargaining “rights” by a margin of 58 to 32.1

  Miller believed the protests were working and saw the fact that we had come to negotiate as a sign that we were feeling the pressure. In fact, the opposite was true. I knew in the long run that our standing with the people would rise after Act 10 passed and our reforms began to work. I had sent Keith and Eric to Kenosha with instructions not to find a face-saving way out but to try to give the Democrats a face-saving way to come home. We were willing to make some changes to the bill, but we would not gut the key provisions.

  Over the course of two hours, they talked about a host of issues, but the discussion kept coming back to one topic: the automatic collection of union dues. The unions would have given up anything else in the bill to keep the dues. The involuntary dues were their lifeblood, the source of their power. They knew that if government workers had a free choice, most would decide to keep their dues and the union coffers would run dry. They could not allow that to happen. They could not care less if we were to lay off fifteen hundred workers or fifteen thousand workers, so long as they could keep their precious dues.

  Keith and Eric made clear that restoring the dues was a nonstarter. But they made progress on other issues and agreed to keep talking. Keith and Eric were encouraged enough that they drew straws to see who would call and wake me up at 11:45 p.m. to say they thought a deal was possible. Later, Eric sent an e-mail to the senators offering concessions on several issues they had raised. A substantive discussion was underway.

  But while we were exchanging e-mails with Cullen and Jauch, Senator Miller had returned to Illinois and held a meeting of his caucus, where he told the other senators that we were not serious. When we learned about it, we considered pulling the plug on the talks. But Cullen and Jauch prevailed on us to keep talking. There’s no doubt in my mind that they were sincere in their efforts to bring the Democrats back. And there is no doubt in my mind that Mark Miller did not share their interest in finding a compromise.

  Cullen kept saying, “Give me a little more time. I’m close. I won’t get them all, but I’ll get a few to come back.” But every time we got close to a deal, it seemed, Miller would step in like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip and pull out the football.

  While Keith and Eric kept the lines of communication open with Cullen and Jauch, on March 2 I went to the funeral of Army 1st Lieutenant Daren Hildago, a West Point graduate from Waukesha who had been killed in Afghanistan. His father was a veteran, and all of his brothers wore the uniform. They were so strong. They told me they were praying for me. I was just amazed that here in their moment of grief, they were talking about praying for me. It was yet another sign that no matter how difficult the coming days would be, they were nothing compared to the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform—and of their families.

  That night, former governor Tommy Thompson came to the capitol for a celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Joint Committee on Finance. He had been planning to just walk into the capitol building, but we had a former adviser of his escort him through the tunnels instead. When I greeted him up in his old office, he lit up. But I could see he was worried about me. He told me, “You’re doing the right thing, but you’ve got to figure out a way to not let this go on much longer.”

  As the talks continued behind the scenes, we tried to ratchet up the pressure on the senators to return. While I barnstormed their districts, senate Republicans had begun using the senate rules to make life difficult for the missing Democrats. Senators in Wisconsin routinely participate in committee meetings by phone, and are allowed to offer amendments and vote on measures. This is not a right under the senate rules. It is a courtesy offered in a spirit of comity. When Democrats violated that spirit by fleeing to Illinois, senate Republicans refused to continue extending the courtesy. So the senate took up bills important to the Democrats and refused to let them vote by phone.

  The senate also voted to hold the missing senators in contempt. They voted to fine them $100 for every day they missed a session. They voted to change the senate rules so the missing senators could no longer have their paychecks automatically deposited into their bank accounts but would have to come to the senate floor to pick them up. (One Democrat, Jon Erpenbach, got around it by giving his chief of staff power of atto
rney.) After a while, it was clear none of these tactics were having much of an effect. It became a bit like Wile E. Coyote setting an “Acme Senator Trap.”

  We knew the standoff with the senate Democrats had become a truly national story that week when late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon featured it on a segment he called “Slow Jam the News.” With the help of his house band, The Roots, and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Fallon performed a “slow jam” about the Madison protests and the departed senate Democrats.

  “Looks like those Democrats left in the middle of the night without even saying goodbye,” Fallon crooned. “Now they’re creepin’ with the lights off and curtains down at a hotel out of town.”

  I wasn’t up late enough to catch Fallon’s show that night, but Matt and Alex showed it to me on the computer. They were pretty excited. I think it was the first time it crossed their minds that maybe, just maybe, dad was kind of cool (just kind of).

  The lighter mood soon dissipated, however, when police discovered forty-one live .22 caliber rifle shells near doorways around the capitol, leading to a heightened security at all entrances. That same day, a judge had ordered that protesters who had been spending the night in the building after normal operating hours had to leave. As police attempted to enforce the judge’s order, the capitol suffered a major breach when two people rushed past law enforcement and opened locked doors, allowing about seven hundred protesters to overrun the police and enter the building. The mood at the capitol was tense.

  That evening, as we exited the capitol through the underground tunnel to the Risser Justice Center, we saw that the bags of riot gear that always lined the hallways were open and the floor was covered with small circular sheets of plastic. I asked my security detail what they were. They were covers from the gas mask filters. The Wisconsin State Patrol had been placed on “Ready Status” in their full civil disturbance gear—including gas masks.