If Wisconsin dirty trick was legal.....

If it was possible for Republicans to pass a bill with no democrats present .... then that proves that people criticizing democrats for obstruction don't know what they're talking about. After all, right wingers, who wanted democrats to return so that they could be steam rollered kept screaming about how the legislators weren't doing their jobs, but now these same republicans say that it wasn't even necessary for democrats to be there in the first place to pass legislation. If it was legal for Republicans to act as they did, which is highly doubtful, given strict open-meeting laws in Wisconsin, then clearly these Republicans were incompetent at their own job, because they didn't act for three weeks when they had the power to do so.

They need to get their story straight. Besides, these missing democrats are doing a better job of representing the interests of their constituents than they would if they were just going to be automatically voted down anyway. The republicans who want the democrats to return are not the constituents of these representatives anyway.

It is also worth noting that Walker has tried to manufacture this kind of phony crisis before, when he tried to bust courthouse unions in Milwaukee in favor of a fat-cat crony deal with Wackenhut. He failed to follow the law then as well, however, and now Milwaukee has to pay back pay to all their courthouse security, as well as pay for the private contract.

This phony $137 million budget "crisis" is as transparently fraudulent as they get. Even in New Mexico we have a budget shortfall of larger than that and our total operating budget is far less. Every year legislators deal with gaps bigger than this and routinely plug them without abolisihing the rights of public employee unions.

On top of that, Walker offered about as much in tax breaks to businesses as the total amount of the alleged "shortfall". If there was really a budget crisis then all he would have to do to plug it would be to rescind the tax breaks, rather than demand that public workers take what amounts to an 8% pay cut.