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F or the two days of court testimony, Judge John Albert wore a black robe and a look that alternated between concern, exasperation, and bemusement to find himself at the center of a case that he called “the largest expression of free speech and addressing the government in the history of our state.” As the case played out on March 2 and March 3 in Dane County’s handsome modern courthouse, answers to even the simplest and most relevant questions sometimes eluded the skilled lawyers in the courtroom. “There’s no beginning level course in what to do with seven thousand people in the statehouse in law school,” Albert said in an interview a year later. In the courtroom that first day, the judge was listening intently to Mike Huebsch, a former speaker of the Assembly and Scott Walker’s top cabinet secretary. At the table to the judge’s left sat Peg Lautenschlager and the other attorneys for the plainti¤, the Wisconsin State Employees Union. The defendants were Huebsch and the state. He was represented by lawyers from the state Department of Justice, and they were seated together at the table to the judge’s right. Those attorneys included Steven Means, a thin, balding man who was Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s executive assistant. Means, a political appointee and able attorney, was putting a seemingly easy question to Huebsch. “Does the Capitol have a graded capacity for occupancy as to the number of people?” Means asked. “It does not,” Huebsch said. “Have you come to a conclusion in your mind what would be an appropriate number of people that it would be permissible to allow into the Capitol?” 14  “Seven Thousand People in the Statehouse” 195 “I have not,” Huebsch said. The administration secretary explained that to him the real answer depended on the number of police that the state could find and a¤ord to pay to provide security. The e¤ect had been made for the audience: unlike other buildings in the state, there was no normal regulation of the Capitol by a fire inspector. Just as it had been for UW–Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling, this was a disappointment to Albert, who was expecting to get an objective standard for determining whether too many people were in the statehouse to be safe. “I was very surprised to find I had no baseline to make that determination ,” he said later. A few blocks away, the Capitol was open but tightly restricted, with about one hundred protesters still camping inside in what they began to call the “rotunda community.” A couple of Democrats hauled their desks onto the Capitol grounds that day to hold oªce hours, meet with members of the public , and draw attention to the fact that people could no longer enter the statehouse as they pleased. The desks were eventually ordered back inside the building. In the courtroom, the case had started that day with several witnesses taking the stand for the plainti¤s. Among them, Representative Kelda Helen Roys and another Democratic lawmaker told the court about how the shifting rules at the Capitol had made it diªcult to do their jobs. The witnesses for the union testified that the demonstrations had been overwhelmingly free from violence and that protesters had mostly gotten along well with the police. The Walker administration’s new policy, the witnesses said, was stifling peaceful dissent. Then Huebsch came to the stand to give a di¤erent view. Like Walker, Huebsch was an a¤able and articulate conservative who rose to prominence at a young age. As Walker’s secretary of administration, Huebsch’s many duties included overseeing state buildings and the Capitol Police. Huebsch, then forty-six, laid out the costs of the sizable police force assembled at the Capitol over the past two weeks. Normally, there were just a handful of oªcers in the Capitol during business hours, but lately there had been anywhere from 160 state and local oªcers to more than 400. So far, Huebsch said, the state had paid more than $2.1 million for the wages and overtime of the oªcers brought in to help the state, not counting their meals and lodging. The final costs, he said, could reach well beyond that, and in fact they did— later accounting put them at more than $9 million. The main argument that emerged from Steven Means’s questions to Huebsch was simple: for...

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