TIA Daily • April 4, 2011
COMMENTARY
Democracy Versus Liberty in Wisconsin
After a few weeks spent mostly transfixed on events in the North Africa and the Middle East, it's time to catch up on domestic news. I'll start with the most urgent story below, then catch up on more news in the next edition. It turns out that the vote by Republicans in the Wisconsin state legislature to break the political power of the public employees' unions was not final. The vote was blocked on a technicality by a leftist judge, and the case is going to the state's supreme court—and the balance of power in that court will be determined by a judicial election to be held on Tuesday. TIA Daily reader and Green Bay area resident Steve Hathway reports: "Wisconsin is still in turmoil over the new collective bargaining legislation. You have mentioned the efforts on both sides to recall state senators. But there will be a political calibration even before recall petitions are turned in. "This Tuesday, April 5, Wisconsin is holding elections for one Supreme Court Justice seat. It is currently held by Judge David Prosser. JoAnne Kloppenburg (I'm not making this name up) is running to unseat him. Her campaign (or supporting groups) has been running TV ads that cast the election in the same terms we heard during the Siege of Madison. She attempts to link Prosser to Walker. The ads talk about how Walker is destroying the middle class, etc. The outcome of this election should be an earlier indication of how successful union and leftists efforts have been. "If Kloppenburg wins, the Court will be left-leaning and likely uphold the ruling blocking publication and implementation of the law." Some of the ads have gotten a bit uglier than Steve mentions, including one ad accusing Prosser of being soft on child molesters—which is refuted here in a response ad that ought to help produce some backlash against the union campaign. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund has a good article providing background on the Wisconsin vote, including the blatant non-objectivity of the initial ruling attempting to block the union legislation. Victory [for the unions] would mean a seat on the court for JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant state attorney general—and a court with a liberal majority that may well uphold Judge Sumi's decision.... Ms. Kloppenburg certainly isn't discouraging such thinking. She told the Madison Capital Times that "the events of the last few weeks have put into sharp relief how important the Supreme Court is as a check on overreach in the other branches of government." Legal analysts say it's preposterous for a judge to enjoin publication of a law before it has even taken effect, as citizens don't have standing to challenge a law until they are subject to it. In a similar case in 1943, the state's Supreme Court ruled that a judge had no such authority. In 1977, another state Supreme Court opinion reiterated that under separation of powers "no court has jurisdiction to enjoin the legislative process at any point." Rick Esenberg, an assistant professor of law at Marquette University, says he is "speechless" over the fact that Judge Sumi "has failed to articulate why she has the authority" to issue her ruling....
Fund points out that this is a matter of life and death for the unions.
Unions can't abide the loss of political clout that will result from ending the state's practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For most Wisconsin public employees, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year, much of which is funneled into political spending to elect the officials who negotiate their contracts.... In 2001, Utah made the collection of payments to union political funds optional, and nearly 95% of public school teachers opted not to pay.
In other words, the unions depend on the state acting as their tax collector, seizing union dues from workers' paychecks
This election should also be viewed as a case study in the folly of judicial elections and the superiority of the federal system of appointment to lifetime terms. Debates over federal judicial appointments are based on judicial philosophy and temperament, and rather than hint at where they stand on specific cases, nominees usually go too far in the other direction, refusing to take any public stand on controversial cases. In Wisconsin, by contrast, a judicial election has been turned away from basic principles and transformed into a partisan political power struggle.
These two issues are connected. Wisconsin is the birthplace of the Progressive movement, and in addition to promoting the power of unions, the Progressives also tried to break down the constitutional structure of government, including the separation of powers and indirect representation, and replace them with "direct democracy," in which every issue is put to an immediate vote by the people. This election is their ideal at work, and we see what it means in practice: giving outsized political power to any faction that is good at mobilizing a mob in defense of its special interests—which in this case is the unions.
All of this is to say that if you live in Wisconsin, it is vitally important that you drop everything to go cast your vote in this election and break the power of this particular faction to loot its membership and the public treasury.—RWT
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