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A blizzard was bearing down on Madison on February 1, 2011, and a political storm was gathering inside the Capitol. Out of the clutches of the cold, Senate President Mike Ellis was tucked away in his elegant oªce just o¤ the Senate floor, where the pictures on the walls told of his lifetime in politics and past encounters with giants like presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Ellis still had no clue about the approach of this political storm, which was to rage long after the snows of the first had melted. But he was about to find out. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald marched into Ellis’s oªce to tell him what he had learned from the governor ’s oªce about Walker’s plan on collective bargaining. “You better sit down; you’re not going to believe what I’m going to tell you,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s going to do away with all [public-sector] unions.” “What?” the Senate president replied. “Holy shit! I can’t believe this.” Fitzgerald, too, had been taken aback when he learned of the plan, even though he had known something big was likely. During the transition, Walker adviser and campaign manager Keith Gilkes—a former aide to Fitzgerald— had told the Senate Republican leader that there would be a budget-repair bill and that it could be contentious, but that Republicans could mitigate the controversy by passing it quickly. Fitzgerald didn’t know details, but he knew polls were being conducted to gauge voter perceptions of public-sector unions. As it turned out, the governor was planning to eliminate all public-worker unions in the state except those for police and firefighters. Private-sector unions would not be a¤ected, but the unions of school, municipal, county, and state employees would lose their oªcial standing. When Fitzgerald found out 5  “Dropping the Bomb” 49 to his surprise what the package would include, he took the matter to Ellis. He saw gaining Ellis’s support as crucial to getting the measure passed because he knew Ellis was a master at burying a bill if he opposed it. Walker’s oªce also understood Ellis’s ability to undermine their agenda and approved of Fitzgerald talking to him early. “He’s not a great friend, but he can be a fantastic enemy,” Gilkes said of Ellis more than a year later. Ellis felt strongly that bold moves were needed to rescue the state’s budget, which was a long-standing crusade of his. At the same time, he knew from experience which subjects at the Capitol were firecrackers and which were dynamite. A former teacher and a political survivor, Ellis led Senate Republicans through much of the 1990s, a time when control of that house pingponged between the two political parties and the art of political compromise was still practiced and appreciated. The idea of blowing up the state’s unions seemed to him ill-advised and, more to the point, impossible to pass in the Senate. Though more conservative than Ellis, Fitzgerald also opposed eliminating public-sector unions altogether because he thought it would be viewed as an attempt to destroy the Democrats politically. Ultimately, Democrats did come to exactly this conclusion, even after the proposal was loosened a small amount. After hearing about the plan from Fitzgerald, Ellis went further than Fitzgerald by arguing for keeping in place fair share payments that would allow the unions to require nonmembers to pay fees equivalent to dues. That would have let unions keep more of their financial resources and the power that they conferred. Ellis and Fitzgerald had a series of meetings on their own to decide what to do and then sat down with the governor for a face-to-face meeting. Walker argued that his plan was a bold but necessary stroke that was essential to setting Wisconsin on solid financial footing for the future. In his blunt style, Ellis dissented. “My God, this is going to cause a firestorm,” he said. Ellis argued for leaving the unions in place and instead concentrating on money-saving moves such as the benefit concessions included in the bill. Rather than negotiating with unions for such givebacks as state oªcials had for decades, the governor’s bill would simply impose the concessions on employees. The move could be immediately invoked since the Senate in December had rejected the labor contracts that would have locked the state into a...

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