WisToon: Hearing No Objection

After patiently ignoring hours of testimony against Right to Work for Less, Wisconsin's Republicans passed their union-busting bill in extraordinary session on a party line vote; and Darth Snotwalker quickly signed the bill he had publicly dismissed as "a distraction" but had privately described years ago as just one more "step" in his "divide and conquer" model of governance.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington, at left in the cartoon) told "Up Front with Mike Gousha" that he had only received a handful of messages from constituents against the proposed bill. He made no mention whether he had received more than a handful of messages from constituents in favor of it.

While RTWFL has been a priority for right-wingers at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce group, there has been no push for it from individual local chambers of commerce, as found by the Wisconsin Business Alliance's Lori Compas:

I wanted to learn the answer to this question: Is WMC really representing Wisconsin’s broad and diverse business community when it claims that businesses want legislators to enact “right to work” laws?

The answer was astonishing: I could not find a single Chamber in the districts of [Republican] senators Fitzgerald, Cowles, Olsen, Moulton, Petrowski, Nass, Lasee, or Harsdorf that supports “right to work.”

In fact, I heard statements like these again and again: “We’re not taking a position on that.” “We don’t take a stand on political issues.” “We only advocate for political issues when there’s a strong consensus among our members — and we don’t have consensus on this.”

A Chamber official in Senator [Scott] Fitzgerald’s [(R-Juneau), above right in my cartoon] district said, “We won’t take a stand on that one way or another. We’re part of WMC because we get a lot of resources from them, like mentoring and executive training and other benefits, but that doesn’t mean we support their legislative agenda.”

Another Chamber official, this time in Senator Lasee’s district, said, “Everyone I have talked to says that it is an issue that should be left between employers and their employees. I haven’t found anyone who says we need the government to tell us how to run our business.”

Me again: I've got to say, that is an astonishingly tepid response from a demographic that tends to skew Republican to a Republican bill guaranteed to pass a Republican legislature and be signed by a Republican governor.

It will take decades before the full effect of the push by Darth Snotwalker and his Madison Minions to depress wages, decimate benefits, and bring a third-world standard of living to the state of Wisconsin. To save their own jobs, Republicans have already begun their assault on the right to vote.  Our only hope is that Walker, notorious for not finishing what he starts, up and quits his current job in favor of heading some right-wing think tank somewhere -- rather than that other job he's got his eyes on.