Unions Lose Court Battle to Roll Back Gov. Walker's Collective Bargaining Reforms

by John Sexton 18 Jan 2013

  A decision issued today by the 7th circuit Court of Appeals says collective bargaining reforms passed by Governor Scott Walker will stand. Act 10 was the controversial reform law passed in Wisconsin in 2011 after weeks of protests and stalling by Democratic members of the legislature. Unions filed suit against the law seeking to have the court overturn it and were partially successful at the district court level. But today the Court of Appeals issued a decision in favor of the law and the Governor. 

Plaintiffs and cross-appellants, representing seven of Wisconsin’s largest public sector unions (the “Unions”), filed suit against defendants-appellants Governor Scott Walker and other state actors, challenging three provisions of the statute—the limitations on collective bargaining, the recertification requirements, and a prohibition on payroll deduction of dues—under the Equal Protection Clause. They also challenged the payroll deduction provision under the First Amendment. The district court invalidated Act 10’s recertification and payroll deduction provisions, but upheld the statute’s limitation on collective bargaining. We now uphold Act 10 in its entirety.

The passage of Act 10 was one of the most controversial political actions taken in 2011. At one point, Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent Republicans from forming a quorum. The Act was passed when they returned despite protests involving tens of thousands of angry union members who filled and surrounded the state house in Madison.

After the initial loss unions spent millions funding recall campaigns against state judges, legislators and Gov. Walker himself. Though they won a handful of races, Gov. Walker survived his June 2012 recall meaning Democrats were unable to overturn the law.

Big Government

Michigan right to work foe to governor: 'We'll be at your daughter's soccer game

December 15, 2012
Rick Moran

 
 Union thuggishness may have hit a new low when an opponent of Michigan's right to work statute all but threatened Governor Rick Snyder's 16 year old daughter:

A speaker at a union protest against right-to-work legislation said if Gov. Rick Snyder signed the bill he would get "no rest" and that protesters would be at his "daughter's soccer game."

The Rev. Charles Williams II made the comments Tuesday to loud cheers before a group of thousands of union workers. After his promises to harass Gov. Snyder, he introduced Rep. Richard Hammel, D-Mt. Morris Township, and House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills. Williams is a Detroit-area pastor and left-wing activist.

Gov. Snyder later that day signed a bill into law making Michigan a right-to-work state. One of his daughters is a 16-year-old high school student.

"Just know one thing, Rick Snyder: You sign that bill, you won't get no rest," Williams said.

"We'll meet you on Geddes Road. We'll be at your daughter's soccer game. We'll visit you at your church. We'll be at your office.

"Because Michigan workers will not take it laying down - by any means necessary!" he said.
Geddes Road is where the Snyder residence is located.

The thing is, this threat must be treated very seriously. Going after the family of their opponents is not unusual for labor thugs.

Snyder's daughter doesn't play soccer - she plays volleyball and softball. Reason enough for her bodyguards to be extra vigilant. 

American Thinker

Throwing Labor Under the Bus

December 15, 2012
By Michael Bargo Jr.

 
 As Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and other states try to limit the collective bargaining rights of organized labor, the national media work to create the impression that Republicans are anti-labor and are undermining the labor unions' hard-earned collective bargaining rights. All "labor unions" are intentionally framed as one homogeneous group idespite the fact that Wisconsin's state legislation was only directed toward public sector unions.

The key to understanding why public and private sector labor are combined by the media reports is to realize that there are three major groups of labor, and that the Democrats created all three.

Historically, Democrats have always been the friends and supporters of organized labor, passing legislation for over one hundred years such as the Wagner Act of 1935. This act was directed toward the traditional private sector organized labor unions such as the AFL-CIO. The second major type of organized labor, public sector labor, was also created by Democrats. In 1959, Wisconsin passed the first law to enable public sector workers to organize and lawfully use tactics such as collective bargaining. Shortly thereafter, Federal government workers were allowed to organize through John Kennedy's Executive Order 10988, issued in 1962. It should be noted that the Federal public sector group was not established through legislation but Executive Order.

The third, most recent, and least discussed group of organized labor is illegal labor. This group was also established by the Democratic Party through subtle and indirect government policy changes such as sanctuary policy, the enablement of the matricula consular card to serve as a valid ID in the state of Illinois, and numerous benefits (see Mexicago: How the Chicago Political Machine created Sanctuary Policy to Exploit Immigrants and Grow Government, 2012. Available at Ebook on Amazon.com) Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has found that illegal immigrants receive 25 benefits, not including education.

The illegal immigrant population in the U.S. exploded after 1990 (Unauthorized immigrant population: National and state trends, 2010. Pew Hispanic Center, Feb. 1, 2011, Table A3, p. 23), yet while the Democratic Party has always labeled themselves as the party of "labor," they have been silent as illegal workers took jobs away from traditional American union and nonunion workers. And this has escalated under President Obama. Remarkably, Steven Camarota has found that two-thirds of the net increase of employment since 2009 has gone to immigrant workers, primarily illegal workers. A recent study, "After the Great Recession: Foreign born gain jobs; Native born lose jobs" by the Pew Hispanic Center published in 2010 found that during the Recession of 2009 American workers lost jobs to illegal immigrants (pg. 6). Not only have illegal immigrants taken jobs from Americans, these jobs were taken during the recession and recovery periods. All Americans lost jobs, including citizen Hispanics.

Protection of the illegal labor group is why Democrats and the media promote the confusion between public and private sector union activities, as seen in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. The motivation for this is that Democrats do not want either the electorate or the private union members to know that their focus has changed: no longer do they give first priority to private union workers. Now their mission is to support public sector unions.

The protection of illegal labor is also demonstrated through the widespread and intentional distribution of disinformation about illegal labor; that "big business" wants low-wage workers, and that immigrants are only in the U.S. "to do jobs nobody else will do." This disinformation allows Democrats to hide the reality that they, not big business, have created the illegal immigration explosion in the U.S.

The Democratic disinformation campaign has successfully achieved two goals: it has 1) hidden from the electorate the fact that Democrats have created the illegal labor pool through their clandestine administrative actions, and 2) discouraged private sector labor groups from protesting against illegal labor. These actions mask their goal of promoting public sector over private sector jobs.

Traditional labor leaders must be aware of the fact that illegal laborers are taking jobs from their union members, particularly low skilled jobs. But they choose to remain silent. Part of the reason they do is that the union building trades have worked at thousands of contracts given out by the Stimulus and Recovery Act programs.

Additionally, many union members may not be aware of the widespread presence of illegal labor throughout the U.S., since it has not been thoroughly reported. Labor union leaders also are in their tight traditional alliance with Democratic Party leaders.

Only public sector unions, such as the SEIU and AFSCME, have actively worked to unionize illegal alien workers. The net effect is that Big Labor keeps supporting Democrats at the expense of American workers. 

No one discusses this. While the media and Big Labor leaders keep silent, the government keeps subsidizing illegal immigrant labor.

What do illegal immigrants offer to Democrats that would place them higher up on the Democrats' priority list? Two things: public sector jobs and population. As I mentioned here before, the older big cities of the Midwest and Northeast are all Democratic party strongholds, and all are rapidly losing population.

Big Labor has chosen to keep its share of deficit spending: high paying government contract jobs financed through the Stimulus and Recovery Act spending programs. Its primary mission does not appear to be protecting the jobs and incomes of average working Americans. Labor leaders are following the marching orders of the National Democratic Party, and have chosen short-term contracts to long-term prosperity.

The great shift in American labor has been toward public sector labor and illegal immigrant labor. These changes explain the focus of the Democratic Party since 1980 and are the best explanation of President Obama's lack of interest in private sector job growth.

In 1955 AFL-CIO President George Meany warned against giving collective bargaining powers to government workers, but his advice wasn't heeded. Those words are coming back to haunt union members. 

Democrats want to maintain the public relations appearance of helping both private and public sector unions, which is why the unions are seen as one homogeneous group, and their role in creating the illegal labor sector has been carefully hidden.

Big Labor has made its choice: it is following the lead of the national Democratic Party in throwing American workers and union members under the bus, so that Democrats can continue to run the big cities and states, and keep the illegal immigrant-entitlement complex running.

American Thinker

Complicity of Silence in Michigan: Media Condones Violence, Racism

by John Nolte 13 Dec 2012

  A predominantly white mob calls a black man named Clint Tarver a "nigger" and "Uncle Tom" as they physically demolish his business. This violence is caught on video, the victim has told his story, and plenty of witnesses exist. Moreover, at the same time this incident occurred, we also have photographic and video evidence of more violence allegedly perpetrated by this same group of pro-union protesters.   

This is happening in America, not some third world country. And it's not happening in 1964, or in the South, or in a miniseries or TV movie; it's happening this week in Lansing, Michigan.

And yet, the media won't cover it.

Let me reiterate: Racism, violence, property destruction --  and all of it caught on VIDEO… And still, the media won't cover it.

It's just not a sensational story with all the elements that usually sets the media ablaze, it's also a legitimate story. This black man who lost his hot dog stand to a mob as racial slurs are hurled at him, was not only a victim and a completely innocent bystander, he was also an institution within the Michigan political world. ..

--

--

 …and yet, the media won’t cover it.

But of course the only reason the media won’t cover it, is, you guessed it, The Narrative.

Because the suspected thugs are pro-union protestors and not Tea Partiers, this act of racial violence is not considered a story. You see, the media doesn't really care about racism or thuggery or violence -- what it cares about is The Narrative -- and The Narrative demands that unions must always be the good guys.

So even if members of the union or their supporters are made up of racist thugs victimizing some innocent guy just trying to make a living -- it's not a story -- not because it's not a story -- but because it can’t be a story because the story would damage The Narrative.  

None of this should surprise anyone. We've seen it all before. In August of 2009, a black vendor selling American flags at a Tea Party event/protest was beaten in front of three witnesses by two SEIU thugs. Another perfectly innocent vendor minding his own business…

And yet, the media wouldn’t cover it.

And yet…

With a whole lot of selective editing and no evidence whatsoever, the same media that won’t cover actual acts of violence and racism will, of course, manufacture acts of violence and racism to defame the Tea Party.  Since there are no legitimate stories to feed The Narrative's need to defame the Tea Party, stories are created out of whole cloth to fit The Narrative's need.

When you think about this and try to take it all in, you ask yourself if it's really possible that the media is honestly and truly this partisan; this blatant and nakedly hypocritical and unconcerned with actual violence and racism?

But it is.

Erik Wemple is the Washington Post's media watchdog. I asked him why the media is all but ignoring this story and if I was crazy to believe that if a predominantly white Tea Party mob had screamed racial slurs while destroying an innocent black man's hot dog stand, if it might not be the biggest story in the universe right now.

Wemple responded via email:

I try not to engage in "what if this had been" sort of conjecture, simply because we can never have perfectly comparable test cases. Brent Bozell yesterday criticized the networks news outlets for having failed to highlight violence, particularly the incident regarding Steven Crowder. When I posed a similar question to the networks, I got very little in return.

I have seen here and there are characterizations of Tuesday's activities as boisterous or spirited or whatever. I think such terms, given the documented outbreaks of mayhem, are inappropriate without noting that fists were thrown and property was trashed.

I also asked Politico's media watcher, Dylan Byers, for comment. He hasn't yet responded.

All that matters is The Narrative.

There's a second phase to my story. Because it’s not just about the media not covering a legitimate story, it's also about the mechanisms the media has in place to ensure they will never be pressured into covering the story.

Here's how it works….

Something happens in real life that goes against The Narrative.

The mainstream media ignores it.

The story breaks. New media explodes.

The mainstream media ignores it.

The story gains legitimate traction.

The mainstream media ignores it.

The story is so real and righteous that law enforcement or Congress eventually gets involved.

The mainstream media ignores it.

But how does the media ignore such a story even as all of this reality swirls around them?

That's what MSNBC, the Huffington Post, Media Matters and other left-wing media outlets are for. Their job is to intentionally muddy the waters of legitimate stories that go against The Narrative with nonsense like this:

But one eyewitness tells MSNBC.com he thinks there may be more to the story. Thomas Duckworth, a Michigan resident and lifelong union member, said he’d been at the AFP tent earlier in the day, when he noticed a man in an NRA hat. Later, he said, he saw the man deliberately loosening the ropes holding the tent up. Duckworth acknowledged that labor supporters had cheered the tent’s collapse, but suggested that AFP had deliberately helped initiate the it, in order to depict their adversaries as an unruly mob.

And this.

In 2004, thanks to pressure from New Media, the mainstream media was eventually forced to cover the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their claims against John Kerry's war record. After Kerry lost to George W. Bush, the media decided this could never be allowed to happen again. So outlets like Media Matters and MSNBC stepped up to manufacture and make up just enough fog and confusion around legitimate stories inconvenient to The Narrative that would justify the media's ignoring of these stories.

Even though the media knows the fog and confusion is all nonsense, it's enough to rationalize back-benching and dismissing what's politically inconvenient.  

This tactic worked to protect Obama's supporters in SEIU from having to face a public backlash for the beating of Kenneth Gladney -- which just happened to occur the same day the White House told their supporters to punch back twice as hard against the Tea Party.

And now the tactic will protect another set of union thugs who are suspected of what would probably be called a hate crime is, you know, The Narrative said it was okay to call it that.

Big Journalism

Unions Reap Their Own Bitter Harvest in Michigan

by Mike Flynn 11 Dec 2012
 

 The Michigan legislature made history today when it passed legislation making the state the 24th to enact right-to-work laws protecting workers. Workers in Michigan can no longer be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment. Perhaps more surprising than the measure's passage, though, is it's genesis. The new law is the direct result of an epic strategic miscalculation by the state's union bosses.

Spooked by the success Gov. Walker was having in reforming the state's public sector unions, unions in MI hatched a plan to put an initiative on the November ballot. The initiative would enshrine public sector collective bargaining rights in the state constitution. GOP Gov. Rick Synder, who largely has governed as a moderate, warned the unions not to push the initiative. He even threatened to bring up the right to work (RTW) issue if they went forward with the ballot measure.

The unions obviously rejected this advice. A knowledgeable source close to the events in Michigan told Breitbart News that almost immediately after the unions launched their initiative a small group of activists, legislators and businesses began meeting to plot a legislative strategy for the RTW bill.

They, very smartly, secured a key commitment from the Governor. He agreed to support the RTW effort if the union initiative, known as Proposal 2, failed. On election day, the initiative failed spectacularly.
58% of Michiganders voted against the union initiative. The unions had spent tens of millions of their members' dues promoting the initiative. Yet, the same electorate that strongly backed Barack Obama's reelection and increased Democrats' standing at all levels of government overwhelmingly opposed the unions.

I guess they were right to be spooked that the public was moving away from them.

My source told me that the scale of the unions' defeat made the RTW bill almost unstoppable. As the vote neared, some legislators started getting cold feet about backing the legislation. On the eve of the vote last week, Gov. Snyder publicly reaffirmed his support of the issue and promised to sign the legislation into law.

This move stiffened the wavering legislators, culminating in today's historic vote.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of this. Michigan is home to the powerful UAW. The state's rates of unionization are among the highest in the country. For something like 20 years, no new states passed right-to-work laws. With today's passage in Michigan and Indiana's passage last year, two states in just two years have passed RTW.

There are many lessons here for conservative. I'll just mention the most important. Even when defeat seems littered around us, there are always opportunities for victory. We must be ready to seize them.

Big Government

Meet the real workers Obama screwed over

By Michelle Malkin

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama’s sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.

It’s not just a slanderous and false attack. It’s a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration’s massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama’s economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.

Let’s dispense with the “Romney = murderer” meme first. The warped Priorities USA ad features the claims of one Joe Soptic, a former employee at the Kansas City-based GST Steel plant. The plant went bankrupt years after Bain Capital acquired it. Soptic blames Romney for the loss of his job and health insurance — and for the subsequent death of his wife a “short time after” the plant’s closure.

But Romney stopped working for Bain in 1999. The plant closed in 2001. And Soptic’s wife died in 2006. Oh, and Soptic admitted to CNN on Tuesday afternoon that the family in fact had health insurance at the time of Soptic’s wife’s death. But it’s still all-powerful, time-traveling, omnipresent Darth Romney’s fault.
Obama flack turned super-PAC slime-master Burton shrugged off the facts and doubled down on the campaign’s class-warfare bloviation. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost,” he told Politico. “Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women, and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”

Yet, the Soptic story is the best they could scrape together? Stamp this one “EPIC FAIL.”

While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration’s economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama’s UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus. It’s the ongoing horror story of some 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto parts company spun off from GM a decade ago.

As Washington rushed to nationalize the U.S. auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer “rescue” funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team and the Treasury Department schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members’ costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

In addition, the nonunion pensioners lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers — most from hard-hit northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states — had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees at Delphi/GM. Some workers have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish.

“I worked for 34 years at GM/Delphi Corp. When Delphi went bankrupt, we lost everything,” Dana Strickland of Michigan wrote me. “Because I was salaried (middle management), we lost our pension and health insurance. I did not belong to the union, so GM/Delphi could have cared less. I have never felt so betrayed. We never hear this brought to the public’s attention. People need to know how we were screwed, while the Obama administration kissed up to the union.”

“I’m one of the Delphi Salaried Retirees that lost the health care, life insurance and 67 percent of the pension I was promised in retirement after working hard for 40 years,” Charles Stone of Michigan e-mailed. “Words cannot describe the frustration and let down these events have thrust on my family’s lives, and to have GM’s rescue all sugar-coated in the current political environment is like putting lipstick on a pig. … We will continue to fight to right this grievous wrong.”

Tom Rose of Ohio added: “I am one of the 20,000 salaried retirees that lost all of my health care and — in my case — a 40 percent pension cut. So I am now paying increased health care costs with fewer pension dollars and contributing what is left to our lawsuit to correct this injustice. Meanwhile, the politically connected union has their full pension and 90-plus percent of their health care. You have hit upon the key question: How can our own federal government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?”

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to “cherry pick” (one Obama official’s own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama’s own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that “attacking the union’s sacred cow” could “jeopardize” the auto bailout deal.

In June, 20 months after a federal judge first ordered the government to cooperate, the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association broke through the administration’s information stonewall and dislodged 62,000 pages of documents in their lawsuit to right the administration’s wrongs. As Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday, the documents included “internal government emails (that contradicted) sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts … and that administration figures violated federal law.”

Meanwhile, the Delphi workers who got shafted are getting in the faces of the administration and the public with a new web ad produced by conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. They are asking, “Why, Mr. President? Why?” They — and America — deserve answers and justice, not more Bizarro World smears and fantastical bedtime stories.



 Michelle Malkin

The Last Gasps of Public-Sector Unionism

June 9, 2012
By William Sullivan

Democrats are settling into a hybrid state of denial, anger, and depression in the aftermath of the Wisconsin recall election, where Scott Walker handed them an historic and embarrassing defeat. 

This was clearly another vote against vampiric public-sector unionism in Wisconsin and the collective bargaining that has grifted copious and unwavering entitlement funding from taxpayers.  But Democrats are in complete denial of that fact.  They are convinced that allowing union bosses to extort money by holding public officials hostage just makes sense in a workers' rights kind of way.  And since Democrats also believe themselves to be the smartest guys in the room, they have no doubt that Americans would agree with them if it weren't for the rich fat cats stuffing money into Walker's campaign chest, allowing for a media onslaught of anti-union sentiment.

Of course, the GOP financial advantage has been dishonestly inflated, often touted by liberal pundits as somewhere in the range of 7-to-1.  This figure, however, does not account for unions' contribution to the campaign, which ring to the tune of about $10 million.  Cameron Joseph at The Hill is nice enough to offer the more reasonable spending discrepancy, reflecting a GOP advantage of roughly 2 to 1.

Doesn't quite give the same picture of shadowy corporate interests swallowing the little man, does it?  After all, Barack Obama outspent John McCain at roughly 2.5 to 1 in 2008.  And the same Democrats now crying foul find no fault in the Obama campaign's propaganda blitzkrieg in the weeks leading to the 2008 election -- an assault that dwarfed McCain's at a spending level of 5 to 1.

This omission of union contributions in considering the logistics of the Wisconsin race is an act of pure deceit, but Americans aren't falling for the ruse.  Public unions have notoriously deep pockets and an organizational infrastructure built upon campaigning, and it is an unspoken truth understood on both sides of the ideological divide that their financial clout and efforts are singularly directed to benefit their own symbiotic existence with Democrats.  And the left now seems keenly aware that if unions do not have the ability to collectively bargain with politicians, and if they are unable to demand that all public workers finance union efforts, public unions will go the way of the dodo -- and with them, the grandiose collectivist ambition of the Democratic Party.

And they are right.  But through mental gymnastics and blind hope, they fail to recognize the real reason why this is all happening to them.  They cling to this notion that big-money corporations and their surrogates in the GOP have poisoned the information well, infecting the public with anti-union fervor when they would otherwise be supportive of the union cause.  But the truth is much, much simpler.

Collective bargaining and the power it brings public unions is so fundamentally abhorrent a prospect that even the godfather of progressivism himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had this to say of the matter in 1937:

All Government employees should realize that the prospect of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.  It has distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purpose of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.  The employer is the whole people, who speak by laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.  Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Ironically, life was breathed into FDR's fears by his own political progeny, who regularly invoke his name. And now, dreaded collective bargaining has been inseparably tied to the fate of Roosevelt's party.

It is now clear that FDR's warning was prescient to the point of being eerie. Public unions have become an organ of a political party, directing public policy by negotiating with administrative officials that are incapable of fully representing the citizenry that subsidizes their existence.  And by way of collective bargaining and the resulting collusion with corrupt politicians, they have pilfered the public treasuries to increase their wealth and influence.

FDR feared the very idea of collective bargaining and public union power, and he was opposed to it in principle.  So why is it so hard for the left to believe that after witnessing five decades of the result, the American public would not fear it also and be opposed to its practice?

The truth that Democrats understandably repress is that Scott Walker was elected to dismantle overgrown public unions the first time around.  And that request was even more emphatic the second time around, after having seen the results of Walker's policy reform.  What Wisconsin has witnessed since 2010, according to Charles Krauthammer, is "a huge budget deficit closed without raising taxes, significant school-district savings from ending cozy insider health-insurance contracts, and modest growth in jobs."

But "the real threat," Krauthammer continues, "is that the new law ended automatic collection of union dues."  As Rachel Maddow laments, "Democrats have no way to compete in terms of big outside money."  

Heretofore, the "big inside money" of the labor unions was Democrats' answer to that.  The unions' "real, practical effect," according to Maddow, is that they "had been big supporters of Democratic candidates and Democratic causes and had had a lot to do with the Democratic ground game."  Clearly, automatic dues collection, a result of collective bargaining, is nothing more than a mandate that all public workers donate to Democratic politicians' war chests.  Since Wisconsin's new law has given public workers a choice, public unions have "experienced a dramatic drop in membership -- by more than half for the second biggest union," dealing a decisive blow to labor unions and, by proxy, the Democratic Party.

So it stands to reason that the choice for Wisconsinites in the recall election was painfully clear to make.  On one path, they could have chosen to preserve their heritage of five decades as ballast for Big Labor and the Democratic Party.  One the other path, they could have renounced that heritage and the failure it has wrought by choosing success and freedom. They reasonably opted for the latter.

Wisconsin's recall election proves that American citizens now find the institution of a powerful public union an anathema, not a boon.  That is why Democrats have come unhinged and now claim that Republicans stole the election.  Wisconsin signals the last gasps of an inherently diseased, and now dying, entity.

William Sullivan blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com and can be followed on Twitter.

American Thinker