If Walker succeeds in Wisconsin, he'll embolden his GOP counterparts elsewhere. | REUTERS GOP govs strike hard at unions

In what passes for major spending news in Washington, a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans this week banded to kill a backup engine for one Air Force jet project.

Total savings: just under a half-billion dollars, chump change in the federal budget.


Meanwhile in the states, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and other members of a new class of combative Republican governors are fighting pitched battles over painful budget cuts that affect issues that once were thought to be untouchable such as teacher tenure and collective-bargaining rights.

These showdowns in the states — expressed most spectacularly this week in Wisconsin’s capital — have brought to life a long-standing cliché of government: The most consequential political action and the most serious policy debates are not taking place in Washington, which appears unlikely to tackle any big-ticket items but, rather, beyond the Beltway, in the state capitols, which Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously labeled the “laboratories of democracy.”

With a budget-cutting and reform zeal unseen since the mid-1990s, a group of Republican chief executives are using difficult economic times to press an ambitious policy agenda that makes their GOP counterparts in Washington seem like timid incrementalists.

Their goal: to shatter a bipartisan consensus on public labor that’s shaped politics in the West, the Northeast and the Upper Midwest since the 1960s.

Welfare reform was the centerpiece legislation at issue for the new GOP governors in the ’90s. Today, public employee rights and benefits are on the firing line. Between the two, there is an important distinction: The political stakes are much greater now.

Aside from social justice advocates and traditional liberals, welfare recipients had little political clout. To take on the well-organized and politically connected teachers and state workers, however, is to strike at the heart of the Democratic Party in many states.

If Walker, who is trying to curb collective-bargaining rights, and Christie, who is attempting to overhaul teacher tenure, manage to succeed, they’ll only embolden their counterparts elsewhere — and potentially do grave damage to what is one of the Democrats’ most important financial and grass-roots constituencies. Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, among other Republicans, are watching carefully, bracing for similar showdowns.

Much of the attention in Wisconsin is devoted to Walker’s proposal to strip state employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything besides their pay and to make them pay more for their health care and pensions.

Yet another element of the legislation could have even greater political consequences. The Republican would end the automatic deduction from their workers paychecks and make the unions collect the dues themselves, a move that would almost surely result in less cash flowing into labor coffers. It would block unions from collecting money from consenting wokers’ paychecks for political operations, and it would force annual elections on whether state workers even want a union, a lethal threat to public-sector labor.

“The new crop of governors is even more bold,” said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who was elected last year but previously served four terms in the 1980s and ’90s. “We came in with a mission. The times call for it. What government has been doing for way too long is unaffordable and unsustainable.”

Branstad, noting that he had just talked to Walker on Thursday and offered his support, told POLITICO he was anxious to reassess Iowa’s public employee benefits and had brought in an official from the private sector to examine the state’s collective-bargaining law.

“We have state employees paying nothing toward their health insurance,” exclaimed the governor with a tone of incredulity. “These are things that have to change.”

He promised an “all-out effort” to take control of the Democratic-held state Senate “to do what other states are doing and what has to be done for the long term.”

Former Michigan Gov. John Engler, who served from 1991 to 2003, said the scene this week in Madison reminded him of Lansing in the early 1990s, when his effort to reform welfare prompted the staging of a tent city on the Capitol lawn and a burning of his likeness in effigy.

“We were able to do a number of things that at the time seemed so dramatic and even draconian,” Engler said.

Yet he acknowledged that what the new Republicans are doing could have more fundamental political impact.

“Because now you’re getting structurally at government itself,” he said.

Democrats and labor leaders see the stakes the same way — which is why they’re rallying by the thousands outside Wisconsin’s Capitol dome.

“Underneath the real crisis about funding and revenue and pensions is an opportunity to take your opponents and knock them down a peg in terms of having their members participate politically,” said former Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern. “It’s an opportunity to rebalance the political scale.”

“Those unions are an important part of the core Democratic coalition — from a purely mechanical standpoint, they matter in our elections,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant, who added that the principle of collective bargaining is also a central one to the party.

“This isn’t just about power and politics — this is one that is truly about principle,” he said.

What makes the politics of it somewhat easier for the new crop of Republican governors, though, is that after a sustained recession, those Americans who work in the private sector and have lost their jobs or seen their wages stagnate have less sympathy for public employees who, in some cases, enjoy enviable health care and pension packages.

New polls out Friday suggested a deep ambivalence on the subject: A Pew survey suggested that a narrow majority would side instinctively with workers against government, but a Clarus Research survey showed 64 percent of voters disapproving of public-sector unions that make financial demands.

And unlike in the mid-1990s, when many GOP governors came to office, most states are facing soaring budget deficits that give the chief executives a measure of cover to push through wide-ranging structural changes in the name of austerity even as Democrats howl and some veteran legislators in their own parties grow queasy.

“I do think you have an establishment interested in the status quo that can’t be afforded anymore,” Engler said.

GOP consultant Phil Musser, a former Republican Governors Association official, was even more blunt: “The public has lost patience with a bloated, 1950s, one-size-fits-all style system that benefits a public employee class that gets special deals.”

But Musser conceded that taking on the public sector — whose unions are now larger than those in industry — also could mean gaining an important strategic advantage.

“A, it’s the right thing to do, B, it’s simple mathematics — we’re taking in less than we’re spending — and, C, it is good politics,” he said.

That’s why the GOP confrontation with labor marks something far more meaningful than the typical policy changes that accompany a switch from Republican to Democratic governance. Instead, it represents a violent break with a bipartisan consensus about government workers that has operated unquestioned for four decades in union-friendly states from California to Michigan to New York.

“The moderate Republicans of the 1960s were totally accommodating to unions,” said E.J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the conservative Empire Center in Albany, N.Y., who cited Michigan Gov. George Romney and New York’s Nelson Rockefeller, who shepherded through that state’s law extending collective bargaining to state workers. “This was the governing consensus up to this crisis.”

Unions extended their reach through the mid-1970s, when attempts to pass a federal law to extend collective-bargaining rights to all public-sector workers stalled amid a wave of high-profile strikes. One in Pennsylvania was led by the fiery local AFSCME leader, Gerald McEntee — now the chief of the national union — whose pointed rallying cries reportedly called for closing the entire state.

But for decades, governors of both parties — including Democrats with close ties to labor like California’s Pat and Jerry Brown, and Republicans like former New York Gov. George Pataki, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld and former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman — waged tough negotiations without trying to drive their labor adversaries into extinction.

“I never tried to change the rules,” said former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a moderate Republican, who recalled in an interview that union members picketed his home in the negotiations over his first budget in the recession of the early 1980s. “I had a confrontation but nothing like Christie’s.”