Walker, ALEC take war on workers national

John Nichols:

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Gov. John Kasich’s anti-labor agenda by 61 percent to 39 percent in a referendum, the nation’s primary proponent of the war on worker rights opened a new front. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker jetted to Arizona, where he huddled with policymakers at the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale. After a series of closed-door sessions, he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.”

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was “bogus.”

Comparing governors who have been attacking the collective bargaining rights of public employees with the founders of the American experiment — “just like that group that gathered in Philadelphia” — Walker told his listeners: “We need to have leaders not just in Wisconsin but here in Arizona …”

If anyone missed the point, Walker said: “Tonight, you might say I’m preaching to the choir with a bunch of fellow conservatives. … I preach to the choir because I want the choir to sing. So tonight I’m asking you to sing. Tell the message in Arizona and all across America that we can do things better.”

The crowd was listening.

Last week Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer — fresh from pointing her finger in the face of President Obama — and her allies in the Republican-controlled legislature announced that they would try to outdo the anti-labor initiatives of Walker and Wisconsin’s Republican legislators.

And they did so in conjunction with the very people Walker had consulted with, spoken to and urged on in November: the Goldwater Institute.

Indeed, as Arizona’s anti-labor initiative was launched, the Goldwater Institute’s website featured an image of 2011 protests at the state Capitol in Madison and a headline speculating on whether Arizona’s fight over labor rights would be: “Bigger Than Wisconsin?”