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T he next day would end in an uproar and recriminations in the other house of the Legislature. In the morning, the massive crowds returned and grew by the hour. By the end of that Friday, February 18, the throng of tens of thousands of people had grown even larger, with their shouts and drumming once again producing a deafening din inside the Capitol rotunda. The unreal stalemate of the day before was now looking all too real and substantial. The Senate Democrats were still somewhere in Illinois—Republicans weren’t sure exactly where—and neither side knew when they would return. Before the day ended, the disorder in the upper house would arrive in the Assembly and have it, too, teetering on the edge of chaos. In the meantime, both sides tried to take their case to the media. So far, Walker had kept much of the coverage and debate in the national media focused on the increased benefit payments that he wanted to require from public workers to help balance the budget. The provisions that the unions and Democrats hated most, the ones that largely repealed collective bargaining in Wisconsin, didn’t always get top attention from the national television networks and press. That made it more diªcult for average viewers outside the state to understand the uproar in Madison. In an interview that morning with the national show Fox and Friends, the host didn’t ask Walker about the repeal of most union bargaining. Instead, he shifted his questions to the Democrats, emphasizing how they had left the state to block a vote in their house. “Did you have any idea something this cockamamie was going to happen ?” host Steve Doocy asked. Walker chuckled. “Not at all.” Some Senate Democrats believed they now had both momentum and time on their side. That morning, Senator Jon Erpenbach sat down to a breakfast 9  First Assembly Vote 115 of pancakes with his aunt and uncle at a Chicago hotel. Erpenbach had left his colleagues in northern Illinois the night before for a CNN interview, and he was settling into the Windy City, where he had family. His location gave him more opportunities for media interviews, and he happily took advantage of them by appearing on Good Morning America and The Rachel Maddow Show. He represented thousands of public employees in his suburban Madison district and had already become one of the primary spokesmen for the Democrats in their self-imposed exile. The televisions around Erpenbach played the CNN interview with him while he ate, but none of the diners around him seemed to notice. Erpenbach texted and talked with his fellow Democrats by cell phone, took a call from MSNBC, and then booked his hotel room for another night, revealing that the chances of an immediate breakthrough were dim. “We certainly think we’re winning the public debate on this,” Erpenbach told the Wisconsin State Journal. “People understand this isn’t about money, it’s about stripping collective bargaining rights, and that’s unsettling to them.” Most of the other Democratic senators had spent the night 115 miles northwest of Chicago in Freeport, and they were doing interviews of their own. Senator Jim Holperin, from a Republican-leaning northern district, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he and his colleagues would return in time to debate and vote on Walker’s budget-repair bill. “We will be back eventually. We won’t obstruct the vote forever,” he said. The problem for Democrats, however, was the same one as for Walker: how could they force an ending without giving up on their demands? Their leader, Mark Miller, issued a statement that day. “We continue to call on the governor and Republicans to allow us to get serious about addressing fiscal issues and creating jobs and drop the unrelated items that do nothing to help us balance our budget,” it said. But what if the governor wouldn’t bend? Enraged Republican senators were struggling to respond to the unprecedented departure. At 9:30 that morning, all but one of the GOP legislators gathered in the Senate chamber and called for all senators to come to the floor. For the second straight day, the chief clerk went through the empty exercise of taking the roll, getting only silence after the names of the Democrats. When that was done, Scott Fitzgerald moved for a call of the house. “We have . . . eighteen members present, not suªcient to move forward. The call...

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