"I think it's the right thing to do," he said. "There are still people upset. We'll still have some issues. But the Capitol lawn is clear today." That is, the protesters have gone home. Now that he's signed the laws into being, there is nothing more protestors can do there.

The question on everyone's mind in Lansing is why Snyder flipped. He's on the record repeatedly, from before he was elected to just months ago, calling right-to-work "a divisive issue" and "not on my agenda." Snyder's technocratic posture had made him broadly popular; now, the liberal-leaning editorial page of the Detroit Free Press, which endorsed him and supported many of his reforms, is accusing him of a betrayal of trust.

But Snyder points out that he never said he was against right-to-work in principle. In 2010, when he was asked if he would sign right-to-work legislation that came across his desk, he answered, "I would sign it, but I don't put it on my agenda."

Now, Snyder says he always thought right-to-work was good policy. But he doesn't have a clear explanation for how an issue that was previously too divisive to consider suddenly became a priority. Essentially, he blames the unions for raising the issue with their ballot initiative, and says he tried and failed to broker a compromise between labor and the right-to-work advocates in the Republican legislature. When that didn't work, he concluded the divisive debate had already been opened, and the best way for him to quell it was to get it over with. "The way I viewed it was, the discussion was going on, so let's take a position now," he told me. "Let's get it resolved. And my position was that I believed it was appropriate to move forward."

But Democrats and labor leaders say they only pushed the ballot measure because they believed right-to-work was in the works and wanted to head it off. And they're not about to let Snyder put the issue behind him. They're preparing court challenges to the legislation, looking at options for yet more ballot initiatives and legislator recalls, and preparing to make Snyder's 2014 reelection bid very difficult.

The bills Snyder signed -- there are two, one for public employees other than police and firefighters, the other for private-sector workers -- go further than those signed by Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, both of whom sparked firestorms with attempts to limit public worker bargaining. In cutting off unions' money supply, Michigan's new laws go beyond bargaining, and they apply to both public and private workers. That won't go down well in the state that birthed the modern American labor movement, Democrats and even some Republicans say.

"How can you for two years tell people you're going to have one position and then reverse it, and jam it through the system, cutting out the public?" asked state Senator Gretchen Whitmer, the leader of the Democratic minority. "That tells me, number one, that it's political, nothing more, and number two, that they're afraid of the public. They're afraid the people of Michigan wouldn't want this." Republicans' majority in the House will be narrower beginning next month, and it's not clear they would have had the votes for right-to-work if they waited beyond the lame-duck session.