After confirming on Fox News that the whole budget repair bill is about making it difficult for Democrats to win in Wisconsin from now on, the GOP in Wisconsin is planning on removing bargaining rights from the public unions by dark of night.
A conference committee is being formed, and will meet at 6 PM in the Senate Parlor Room. This is a peculiar move, since conference committees generallyh only happen to work out differences in bills passed by both houses of the legislature. In this case, only one house has passed the bill. All reports indicate the committee is meeting with the intention of separating the current budget repair bill into two different bills, one of which has fiscal issues, and the other of which only removes bargaining rights from the unions. This removes all pretense that any of this was intended to save the taxpayers money, and indicates that the bill is solely a political power grab, intended to bust the public-employee unions in the state, and deny funding to the Democrats.
It is not currently clear if the bill is separated in this way if it will be passed this evening by both houses (minus the missing Senate Democrats) or if passing the bill will wait until tomorrow. There is no reason to believe that there is any reasonable way to obstruct this bill if it only deals with non-fiscal issues.
I'm personally amazed that they are willing to be so bald-faced about this. It clearly proves that the Republican story over the last three weeks is a lie. They are so desperate to break the unions that they are willing to make a separate bill for that purpose only, and to let the actual fiscal parts of the bill go until the Democrats return from Illinois. We're witnessing bald political manipulation at its worst in Wisconsin tonight. Protest organizers are asking for a turnout at the capitol as soon as possible at the Senate Parlor Room.