Dispatch from a Divided Wisconsin

Before Wisconsin State Representative Nick Milroy was tackled by police on the night of Thursday, Mar. 3, he spent the day at his desk, visiting with his constituents in a parka, a knit hat, and mittens. He had hauled the desk from his office onto the snow-blotched lawn outside the State Capitol in Madison. Before him were the usual accessories: pictures of his family, fliers, and business cards. He was flanked by the American and Wisconsin flags. Next to him, Representatives Cory Mason and Fred Clark were also holding office hours in their swivel chairs, having defied a demand from the assembly's chief clerk to return their office furniture to their offices.

The Capitol had been effectively shut for four days as the extreme game of politics in Madison continued, a spectacle that is riveting taxpayers—and the public servants who work for them—nationwide. At this point hardly anyone needs reminding of the story line. On Feb. 11, newly elected Governor Scott Walker proposed a "budget repair bill" that imposed pay cuts on public-sector employees in the form of larger paycheck deductions for pensions and health care, and stripped public-sector unions of most of their collective bargaining rights in an effort, he said, to allow municipalities to hold down their labor costs. In a direct attack on the power of the unions, the bill would forbid them from automatically deducting dues from worker paychecks. To prevent the bill from coming to a vote, the entire Democratic state Senate minority—14 senators in all—fled to neighboring Illinois. Their supporters filled the Capitol in protest, with hundreds sleeping over. Walker and the legislature's Republican leaders responded with siege tactics, passing a rule requiring that representatives pick up their paychecks in person, issuing arrest warrants for the missing Democrats, locking the Capitol and ringing it with police, and finally, on Mar. 9, executing a clever piece of parliamentary trickery. They stripped the collective bargaining provision out of the budget repair bill so it could be voted on without a quorum, and passed it.