To understand how the Wisconsin court came to this decision, Gableman is the ideal justice to focus on. As an undistinguished county trial judge, he was recruited by business organizations to run against Louis Butler, a liberal and the court’s only black member, in the 2008 election. He narrowly won, giving the conservatives a majority, in a campaign so ugly that the Wisconsin Judicial Commission brought charges against Gableman for “reckless disregard for the truth.” He had run TV ads that gave the false impression that Butler had tried “to put criminals on the street.” (In two reviews of the charges, Gableman was not sanctioned for reasons better explained by politics than logic.)
.. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group in Wisconsin, Gableman would not have been elected without the support of Wisconsin Club for Growth, the state arm of the national Club for Growth, and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state chapter of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These two groups spent a total of $2.75 million on so-called issue ads during the campaign, more than five times what the Gableman campaign spent. They are, as the center noted, the “same groups that allegedly coordinated with Walker and brought the challenge to these coordination rules.”
.. A September 7, 2011, e-mail from Doner to Walker, Johnson, Rindfleisch, and Keith Gilkes, who ran Walker’s 2010 campaign to be governor, became the governor’s chief of staff, and was a senior adviser to the 2012 recall campaign, containing “quick thoughts on raising money for Walker’s possible recall efforts.” Doner suggested the following for Wisconsin Club for Growth: “Take Koch’s money.” “Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.” “Corporations. Go heavy after them to give.”
Scott Walker’s Wisconsin Audition
At the time he proposed Act 10, Walker claimed that busting the public employees’ unions was necessary because Wisconsin was facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and that the deficit couldn’t be closed, as he told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,”“with the current collective bargaining laws in the state.”
.. And while Walker claims to have saved the state $3 billion during his first term as a result of Act 10, he almost surely could have gotten the same givebacks by bargaining for them, as other states, such as Rhode Island, have done.
To put it another way, Walker busted the public employee unions not because he had to but because he could.
.. No, what motivated Walker, clearly, was politics. Unions, which have long been traditional Democratic allies, have been in steep decline — except for public employee unions, which now make up just under half of all union workers. By crippling them, Kettl told me, “Walker is trying to put a stake in the heart of a strong piece of Democratic support that has long been a thorn in the side of the Republicans.”
.. As Kaufman nicely puts it, passing Act 10 was his “audition” for potential big money backers like the Kochs.