Unintimidated Read online

  Our opponents in Madison were right about one thing: If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere—even in our nation’s capital.

  CHAPTER 1

  “This Is What Democracy Looks Like”

  Governor, we’ve lost control of the capitol.

  The call came from my deputy chief of staff, Eric Schutt. Amid the chaos, his voice was calm and matter-of-fact: Thousands of protesters had overrun the police, and were rampaging through the historic Wisconsin state capitol building.

  It was March 9, 2011, and the state senate had just held a sudden, unexpected vote on our legislation to reform collective bargaining. The move had caught the unions and the protesters by surprise. With fourteen Democratic senators still hiding out across state lines in Illinois, everyone had thought that the senate could not act. Under our state constitution, a vote on any bill that includes fiscal measures requires a quorum of at least twenty senators. There were only nineteen Republicans. Without at least one Democratic senator present, we could not pass the bill.

  Unbeknownst to them, we had found a way to overcome their obstruction. Several weeks earlier, we discovered that if we split the bill into two—removing the fiscal provisions that required a quorum—the senate could pass the collective bargaining reforms as a stand-alone measure, without the missing Democratic senators present.

  It was a simple, clean solution, and we urged the senate to do it right away. But the Republican senators hesitated. They were afraid that if they passed collective bargaining provisions alone, without the fiscal savings, they would be accused of union-bashing.

  Of course, they were accused of union-bashing anyway. And as the weeks went on, while the senate was wringing its hands, their inaction had given the union bosses time to organize protests and build pressure.

  In February, first hundreds and then thousands of people began living inside the capitol building. Every hour the protesters held a massive rally under the capitol dome, with bullhorns, drum circles, bagpipes, and chanting and singing. The roar of the crowd was nearly constant. The sound sometimes reached more than 105 decibels—louder than a Packers game at Lambeau Field. It literally shook the building.

  The protesters in the capitol accosted anyone in a suit, shoving cameras in their faces and demanding to know who they were. The building was strewn with garbage and empty pizza boxes. It was so packed with human bodies that there was no way to move around, much less clean. After a while, the floors became covered with a disgusting film, and the odor of unwashed humanity wafted through the hallways. The place smelled like a Port-a-John. When the protesters eventually left, work crews with power washers had to spend days scrubbing the building from floor to ceiling.

  People were smoking pot inside the capitol. There were so many sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses, and tents that my staff often joked about how many “protest babies” there would be in nine months’ time.

  After weeks of this chaos, on March 3 a judge finally ordered the police to clear out the capitol and restore a semblance of order. Instead of thousands, they allowed between five hundred and seven hundred protesters inside at a time, and required them to leave each night. In normal times, several hundred protesters inside the capitol would have been disruptive. But after weeks of occupation, it seemed like a relief.

  Unfortunately, the relative calm would only last a few short days.

  Outside the capitol, the protesters continued to march and chant and accost legislators. After enduring weeks of abuse, the Republican senators’ frustration with the protests and the Democrats’ obstruction grew. When it finally became clear their Democratic colleagues were never coming back from Illinois, the senate Republicans finally decided they had had enough. Opposition to splitting the bill melted away. The senate decided to act.

  On the morning of March 9, I met with the Republican caucuses in the senate and the assembly. We laid out an orderly plan to end the standoff and pass the bill. Republican leaders would announce that they had scheduled a hearing of the conference committee for the following day. The committee would meet, split the bill, and send it to the full senate for a vote. The senate would act and then send it to the assembly for final passage. While this was going on, I would fly across the state to rally support for our plan. The whole process would take forty-eight hours.

  I left the meetings and headed to the airport. I was both relieved that we were finally ending this impasse and energized that we would finally be enacting our reforms.

  The capitol was quiet as I departed that morning. Since no one was expecting the senate to act until the following day, and the costs of security were soaring into the millions, at around 3:30 p.m. my secretary of administration, Mike Huebsch, sent home the two hundred or so reserve police officers in the basement of the capitol.

  Big mistake.

  At 4:10 p.m. Mike got an urgent call from Eric Schutt.

  “The senate’s going in at six p.m.,” Eric told him.

  “What the [EXPLETIVE] are you talking about?” Mike asked.

  “They’re going to pass the bill,” Eric explained.

  Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald had decided to throw our orderly plan out the window and vote on Act 10 that night. He was presiding over a skittish caucus, and did not know how long he would have the votes. He decided not to wait.

  Mike’s face blanched. “Oh God, I just let the police officers go.”

  There was no way to call them back.

  Fitzgerald posted a notice on the bulletin board outside the senate publicly announcing that the Joint Finance Committee would meet at 6:00 p.m. At the appointed time, the committee met for four minutes, split the bill, and voted it out. (Senate President Mike Ellis could be heard whispering under his breath as assembly Democrats protested, “Call the roll . . . call the roll . . . call the [EXPLETIVE]-ing roll.”) The senate then met, passed the bill, and adjourned. The whole process, from public notice to final passage, took about four hours.

  As word about what the senate was doing spread, social media exploded. The unions and their supporters flooded Twitter and Facebook with urgent calls for protesters to rush the capitol.

  Standing on the capitol steps at dusk, Mike Huebsch watched as an army of thousands formed on State Street and began marching toward him. Soon they had descended on the building, banging on the doors and windows, chanting, “Let us in! Let us in!”

  The small contingent of capitol police was quickly overwhelmed. Protesters ripped the hinges off an antique oak door at the State Street entrance and streamed inside. Mike watched in disbelief as the window to Democratic Representative Cory Mason’s office opened right in front of him and protesters began crawling into the building. Once inside, they began unlocking doors and bathroom windows until a sea of thousands had flooded the capitol.

  Still standing outside, Mike called the deputy chief of the capitol police, Dan Blackdeer, to report what he was seeing.1

  “We’ve lost the ground floor, we’re dropping back to the first floor,” Blackdeer told him from inside the besieged capitol.

  A few moments later, his phone rang:

  “We’ve lost the first floor, we’re dropping back to the second.”

  A few minutes later: “We’ve lost the second floor.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t give up the third floor,” Mike said. That was where our command center was located.

  “I know, sir,” Blackdeer said. “I’ve got to go.”

  The protesters ran amok, chanting “This is our house!” and “This is what democracy looks like!”

  And they began searching for the Republican senators who had dared to defy the will of the unions.

  As the mob combed the building for the offending legislators, the police snuck the senators and my staff out through an underground tunnel that took them beneath the square outside, and then up into the Risser Justice Center across the street. Incred
ibly, a Democratic representative put out on social media that the senators were in the tunnels. So when the senators came up into the Risser Center lobby, the protesters were there waiting for them.

  The tall windows that framed the lobby were plastered with people yelling and banging on the glass.

  They were trapped.

  The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. The door opened and they rushed out past the screaming throng to the bus. Once they were on board, the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. Some lay down in front of it, trying to prevent the bus from pulling away. The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.

  Eventually, they cleared a path and slowly the bus inched away. The police decided to divert to the Department of Military Affairs, a secure area where any protesters following the bus could not enter. From there, they drove the senators back to their cars, away from the capitol.

  Eric Schutt and my chief of staff, Keith Gilkes, escaped from the Risser building in a car driven by a very large and imposing police officer. They decamped to Lucky’s, a bar a couple of miles from the capitol, where they called and filled me in on the harrowing escape. From a booth in the corner, Keith got firsthand reports from Mike, who was still on the capitol steps watching everything unfold, while Eric relayed the reports to me.

  Mike was new on the job, so at first the protesters did not recognize him. But he was wearing a suit and talking on a cell phone, which made him suspect in their eyes. Soon a group of protesters was in his face, demanding to know who he was. He told me later it was the first time he had truly felt frightened for his safety. He made a quick escape and joined the rest of our team at Lucky’s.

  By morning, the police had regained control of the capitol, which was now being protected by SWAT teams in full body armor from the Justice Department’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI)—the attorney general’s police. It was like a scene out of Call of Duty.

  The assembly met at 12:30 p.m. As Representative Michelle Litjens tried to say an opening prayer, the Democrats shouted her down. They wanted the Reverend Jesse Jackson—the former Democratic presidential candidate who had come to Wisconsin along with other B-list celebrities to join the protest movement—to deliver it. Incredibly, he was allowed to do so. I will never forget the image of Reverend Jackson, smiling in the well of the assembly while Representative Bill Kramer, the speaker pro tempore, sat next to him with his head in his hands. The Democratic leader offered a motion to remove Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, which failed. After three hours of debate, Act 10 was approved by a vote of 53 to 42.

  We wanted to avoid a repeat of the previous day’s security disaster, so Keith asked Ed Wall, the head of the DCI team, if there was any way to get the legislators out of the building in secret. Ed said there was, so long as no other police units knew the plan. Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney had already declared that his force would not be used as my “palace guards.”2 Ed feared other units might tip off the protesters.

  So Ed arranged for a “decoy bus” to be parked outside the capitol and told the Madison Police Department to help block off the street. Without telling the Madison police, Ed then secretly arranged for eighteen vans driven by DCI SWAT officers to be parked in the garage under the Risser building. When the heavily guarded bus pulled up on the Capitol Square, all the protesters went streaming toward it, ready to accost the legislators.

  As they did, Ed quietly snuck the assembly members through the underground tunnel and into the waiting vehicles, which sped away one by one out of the Risser building before most of the protesters could figure out what was going on. A few of them noticed the last few vans spinning out of the garage and yelled to the crowd, “Hey, they’re over here!” But it was too late.

  The next morning, on March 11, 2011, my legal counsel Brian Hagedorn sent the bill to me at the governor’s residence. My initial reaction was to rush and sign it then and there. The protests had eaten up a good month of our time, and I was eager to get back to my number one priority: helping the people of Wisconsin create more jobs. But Scott Matejov, one of my top aides, suggested that we should at least take a picture or two first to mark the historic moment. I stood for a moment and took it all in. But since we did not want to take any chances, I signed Act 10 into law right there at my dining room table.

  After all we had been through, I was not going to simply sign this law in private, as if hiding from the crowds. We would also hold a formal signing ceremony in the capitol later that day.

  —

  Soon, I headed back to the statehouse via the Risser building. Once parked, I made my way through the underground tunnel to my office in the capitol. Up above, throngs of protesters were chanting on the Capitol Square, but down here it was eerily quiet.

  We passed beneath a bakery, which filled the tunnel with the smell of warm fresh bread. Then, turning the corner, I stared down the hundred-yard underground corridor dotted with emplacements of riot gear every fifteen yards or so. It was a grim reminder of how serious things had gotten in and around the capitol.

  As I walked up the back stairs to my office, I was greeted by Scott Fitzgerald and his brother, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald; Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder; Senate President Mike Ellis; joint finance committee cochairs Representative Robin Vos and Senator Alberta Darling; as well as other courageous legislators who had voted for this bill.

  These individuals had withstood intense pressure, and protests unlike anything seen in Madison before, in order to pass our reforms. And now that the legislation was finally law, they were still being threatened. As he raced back to Madison from hiding out in Illinois, Democratic senator Chris Larson issued a stark warning: “Everyone who is a party to this travesty is writing their political obituary.”3

  So I would have understood if Act 10’s supporters had decided to skip the ceremony. But they wanted to be there. They were proud of what we had accomplished, and I was proud to stand beside them. We had become like a family.

  As protesters outside chanted “Shame!” I took a dozen pens, one by one, and signed Act 10 before the cameras. I might well have been signing my own political death warrant. But as I formally affixed my signature to the new law, politics was the furthest thing from my mind. We had done something important for our state, something I knew would put Wisconsin on the path to fiscal solvency and greater prosperity. And perhaps our actions would inspire politicians in other states, and even Washington, to do the same.

  “Some have asked whether this is going to set a national precedent,” I said after signing the law. “For us we’re doing this to lead the way in our own state, to get Wisconsin working again.” But if our actions ultimately inspired others “to stand up and make the tough decisions . . . so that our children in all states and across the country don’t have to face the dire consequences we face because previous leaders have failed to stand up and lead, I think that is a good thing.”

  It was certainly my hope that others would eventually follow our lead. But at that particular moment, it was unlikely that anyone was looking to us as a model.

  Since Election Day, my approval rating had dropped nearly ten points. One poll showed that if the 2010 gubernatorial race were held again, I would lose to my opponent, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, by a margin of 50 to 43 percent.

  Time magazine declared me “Dead Man Walker.”4 Writing in National Journal, Paul Maslin, pollster to former California governor Grey Davis (who was removed from office in a recall election), warned that the same would happen to me.5 Democratic strategist Dean Debnam of Public Policy Polling said of my electoral prospects: “He’d be done if the vote was today, it’s just a question of whether that desire to
put him out can continue to be sustained in the coming months.”

  In fact, in the coming months, my approval would drop even further. In June 2011, a 53 percent majority of Wisconsinites said they either “very much” or “extremely disapproved” of the way I was handling the job of being governor of Wisconsin. At one point, my approval rating reached an all-time low of 37 percent.6 To put that in perspective, President George W. Bush’s average approval rating during his second term was 37 percent.7

  Not good.

  Support for our reforms was upside down as well. One poll showed that 74 percent of Wisconsin voters said that if public workers agreed to pay more for health care and pensions, they should be allowed to retain all their collective bargaining “rights.” That included nearly half (47 percent) of all Republicans. Only 21 percent of voters agreed collective bargaining should be curtailed.8

  The protests and union propaganda were taking their toll. But standing there in the governor’s conference room, as the ink dried on Act 10, I was not the least bit worried.

  That was for one reason: I knew our reforms were going to work.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Go Ahead and Do It!”

  How could I be so sure our reforms would work? How could I be certain that, freed from the grip of collective bargaining, local officials could save millions, improve schools, and make government work better?

  Because I had been a local official.

  In 2002, I was elected to lead Milwaukee County, one of the most Democratic-leaning counties in the state. My predecessor as county executive, Tom Ament, had presided over a pension scandal in which county officials rewrote pension rules to give themselves six-figure lump-sum payments on retirement, on top of their already generous monthly pension checks.1 Had he won reelection, Ament had stood to receive a lump-sum payment of $2.3 million when we retired, in addition to an annual pension of $136,000 a year for life.2