"Let's be clear: The high-stakes standoff in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing the state's budget."
So began Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson's not surprisingly one-sided piece Tuesday:
At this point, it's clear for all to see that Gov. Scott Walker's true aim is to bust the public employee unions, thus permanently reshaping the political landscape in the Republican Party's favor.
Democratic state senators who fled the state to forestall Walker's coup have no choice but to remain on the lam.
Imagine that.
An election was held in November. A Republican governor was elected promising to balance the state's budget. With the help of a newly-elected Republican senate, he crafted a bill that will do just that.
But a Pulitzer Prize-winning former assistant managing editor of one the nation's most-respected newspapers is publicly condoning the minority Party's shameful act of fleeing the Capitol to prevent a vote on legally crafted legislation.
Is this the state of America's media today?
It's one thing to support the unions in this battle, but to sanction the anti-democratic actions of Wisconsin's Democrat senators is a different thing altogether.
Assume for a moment the shoe was on the other foot, and a Democrat governor with a Democrat senate had crafted legislation that balanced the budget with tax hikes on the so-called rich.
If the Republican minority fled the state to prevent a vote, would Robinson or any of the other union-loving media be supporting the right for Republicans to do so, or would they be shouting from the rooftops about Republican obstruction?
Despite the obvious answer, Robinson continued:
The Wisconsin unions have recognized this fact. Union leaders have announced that they are prepared to accept Walker's proposal on health and pension contributions. In other words, money is no longer an issue.
Walker won, right? He got what he wanted, didn't he?
Actually, no. Bringing health and pension benefits in line with reality was never the point.
Walker and the Republicans are insisting on the provisions in the bill that would deny collective bargaining rights to public workers. The GOP's focus is not on the practical impact of this measure - the unions have acquiesced to Walker's financial terms - but on the political impact.
Nonsense. As Robinson previously noted about the luxurious health insurance and pension benefits Wisconsin's public employees enjoy, "They were negotiated, which means that state and local officials agreed to the contract provisions now deemed so excessive."
Indeed. They were negotiated with collective bargaining, which when it comes to public employee contracts means the union put a gun to the government's head denying much-needed services to the citizenry thereby making what Don Corleone and Luca Brasi would call an offer you can't refuse.
Wisconsin is in financial trouble specifically due to such one-sided negotiations in the past, and the only way to permanently solve the state's long-term budget woes is to prevent this from happening in the future.
Accepting labor's concessions now without preventing subsequent collective bargaining on benefits would be like putting a band-aid on a severed artery: you might temporarily eradicate the symptom while totally ignoring the sure to be fatal cause.
Not surprisingly, Robinson views Walker as engaging in "pure, unadulterated union-busting - not with goons and brickbats, but with the stroke of a scheming governor's pen." But accepting labor's concessions would be similar to what his colleague Dana Milbank said of the President last week.
"In his new budget, Obama kicks the can one more time...The president makes no serious attempt at cutting entitlement programs that threaten to drive the government into insolvency."
If Walker accepts anything that doesn't prevent public unions in Wisconsin from negotiating benefits in the future, he would have kicked the can on his state's budget just as Obama did last Monday.
Alas, I don't imagine the Pulitzer Prize-winning Post columnist, who is also a staple on MSNBC these days, would ever agree to this without someone making an offer he couldn't refuse.
