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O n the cold Madison morning of February 17, Senator Mark Miller walked down King Street toward a meeting that might decide the fate of Walker’s bill. The Senate was scheduled to convene at 11 a.m. for the sole purpose of considering the measure, and already crowds were gathering outside the statehouse. Miller wasn’t headed to his oªce as he normally would be—he was going in the opposite direction. A half block from the Capitol square, he slipped through an unobtrusive door between a co¤eehouse and a restaurant and climbed the stairs to the oªce of the state Democratic Party, where he had told his colleagues to meet him supplied not with amendments or speeches but with a toothbrush and change of clothes. He had told the other Democrats that he had a bold plan to slow down, perhaps even block, Walker’s swiftly moving bill. “Pack your suitcase and come to Democratic headquarters,” he told one senator in a 6:30 a.m. wakeup call. “We are going to have a conversation and talk about leaving the state.” When the senators arrived, no one knew if they all would back the plan as they had to for it to succeed. Newly elected Senator Chris Larson of Milwaukee was so desperate to stop the bill that he had had his sta¤ research filibusters only to find there was no permanent block in Wisconsin. And Larson was skeptical his colleagues would agree to leave the state. “We’re Democrats ,” he said. “You get fourteen in a room and you’ve got twenty-two di¤erent opinions.” The meeting got started with chit-chat, not drama, but it also moved quickly. Miller laid out the idea: By departing the state, Democrats would leave Senate 8  The Interstate to Illinois 93 Republicans powerless to vote on the bill. Ordinary bills needed only a simple majority of senators—seventeen of thirty-three—to be present to hold a vote. But under Section 8 of Article 8 of the state constitution, bills that imposed taxes, borrowed money, or spent money required three-fifths of either house of the Legislature to be present for a vote. In the Senate, that worked out to twenty senators, or one more than the nineteen that Republicans had. Given that the bill included spending provisions like additional money for state prisons, there was no way it could pass the Senate if all Democrats boycotted the vote. Miller told his colleagues, “It only works if all fourteen of us go.” Miller’s plan came out of his oªce and had been privately discussed for weeks among a small group before Walker actually announced his union measure. The senator and his aides had talked about what they would do if Walker followed through on the idea he floated in December of seeking to decertify unions. In the brainstorming sessions, they discussed whether the Democratic senators could leave the state as legislators in Texas had in 2003 to block a controversial bill to redraw congressional districts. As it turned out, in certain cases they could. Jamie Kuhn, Miller’s chief of sta¤, had the idea of denying Republicans a quorum, and the senator and his sta¤ worked together to explore it. When Walker had unveiled the legislation on Friday, February 11, another Miller aide reached out within hours to an attorney at the nonpartisan Legislative Council to see whether Walker’s bill would trip the constitutional requirement for a larger quorum. By Tuesday, February 15, the Legislative Council had delivered a memo to Miller confirming that the three- fifths quorum would be needed for that bill. Heading someplace safe—like Illinois—would block a vote. “It was clear we controlled the progress of the bill once we did that,” Miller said later. That week, Miller quietly discussed the idea with a few other Democratic lawmakers. Many didn’t take the idea seriously, believing that the entire caucus would never agree on it. Miller and his sta¤ have adamantly denied ever discussing the plan with unions until after they put it into motion. In spite of the preparation, there was little more to the plan that Miller presented to his colleagues the morning of the vote than simply crossing the state line. The plan, Miller told the senators, was to slow down the bill’s progress and allow time for voters to get more details about it. The senators said later that they believed they...

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