And now this: (from Solidarity Wisconsin and Defend Wisconsin, full article here)



The Assembly Organization Committee has placed the state budget into an “Extraordinary Session” scheduled to begin 11 a.m. on Tuesday June 14th. In contrast to a special session, which is called by the governor, an extraordinary session is initiated by the legislature. Extraordinary Sessions are very rare. In fact, since made possible by a joint rule in 1977, the assembly has scheduled extraordinary sessions only ten times, the last in 1993.

Here are some of the special features of the extraordinary session:

• No notice of hearing before a committee shall be required other than posting on the legislative bulletin board, and no bulletin of committee hearings shall be published.

• The daily calendar shall be in effect immediately upon posting on the legislative bulletin boards. A printed calendar isn’t required.

• Any point of order shall be decided within one hour.

• There can be no motions to postpone action to a day or time certain.

• Any motion to advance a proposal and any motion to message a proposal to the other house may be adopted by a majority of those present and voting.

• The session can be expanded to include any other legislation, including new legislation.



Basically, this is the slick workaround to evade those pesky "open meetings" laws that have kept Wisconsin legislation honest for decades. Don't give the Judge Sumis of the world anything to work with: find the loopholes and push immoral community-killing budget items forward without debate, and without witness.

The Republicans can do what they want to. They can do it quickly. They can do it without constraint. Why?

Because they can!

We're already mad. We're already working the streets, the neighborhoods, the communities. We're already working the elections.

See you in Madison this Tuesday. And see you, Republicans, at the recalls! We can only hope that the bigness of your littleness will diminish to a dim but persistent historical memory: a rough nightmare from some stressful economic times when honest citizens confused fundamentalism for governance and voted you shitheels into office.

+++++++++++++Update: From 1:36 pm email in inbox++++++++++++



Several news sources have confirmed that the state assembly will include language that gut collective bargaining for public employees. Please come to the capitol tomorrow at 5:00 to speak out! Rally Against the Budget

5:00 p.m.

Capitol Square, Madison The GOP has called an extraordinary session to ram through their slash-and-burn budget, including the widely unpopular collective bargaining provisions. The extraordinary session will allow the majority to pass virtually anything they want, all with little or no public input. Because of their extreme nature, extraordinary sessions are very rarely used, and have never before been used to pass the state budget.

The above is from an email I just received from the AFT union. Of course, we have been waiting for this bad news - kind of like waiting for a hurricane looming a hundred miles off the coast. They can't get support for union-busting from the citizens, so they figure out how to do it under the shelter of their cloaking devices.... Why?

Because then can!