Three years ago Tuesday, Gov. Scott Walker signed into law Wisconsin Act 10, a budget repair bill that contained historic collective bargaining reforms for public sector labor unions. The legislation did not reach his desk easily; Democrats in the Senate fled the state, labor union members rioted at the state Capitol, and some Republican state senators nearly killed the plan.
One GOP senator who nearly gutted Act 10 now wants his job back.
Van Wanggaard was among those Republicans in the state Senate who thought Gov. Walker’s reforms were going too far. The freshman lawmaker had been elected the year before. A former police officer, Wanggaard used to work as a negotiator on behalf of a police union. Walker’s plan exempted police officers and firefighters, but that wasn’t enough for Wanggaard.
Working with fellow Republican Dale Schultz, Wanggaard spent several days in mid-February trying to come up with a plan to pare back Walker’s proposal. According to “More Than They Bargained For,” an account of the fight over Act 10 written by two reporters, the effort unfolded like this:
“Dale Schultz, the veteran GOP senator from southwestern Wisconsin, had been working on an amendment that would have seriously weakened the governor’s proposal. Van Wanggaard, the freshman Republican senator from Racine, had been helping.”
According to the reporters’ account, Wanggaard was telling other GOP senators at the time that he would not vote for the collective bargaining reforms in their current form.
Wanggaard and Schultz hatched a plan that, according to WisPolitics, would have eliminated the requirement that unions recertify annually, protected the power of unions to take dues directly out of the paychecks of members whether they wanted to pay those dues or not, and forced local governments to start bargaining with labor unions again after December 31, 2013.
If Wanggaard had gotten his way, the reforms of Act 10 would have expired by now.
As one writer at a liberal Madison publication noted of Wanggaard’s plan, “And because unions will still be able to collect dues from workers, they will have the funds to conduct an aggressive campaign over the next two years.”
And campaign aggressively they likely would have done. The bruising battle to pass Act 10 the first time was not something many Republicans appear eager to repeat, and certainly not two years later on the eve of a gubernatorial election.
Despite raising more money than the Democrat candidate who ran against him, Wanggaard lost his seat in a recall election in 2012. While his cohort in compromise Dale Schultz announced his retirement from the state Senate at the end of this year, Wanggaard wants his seat back.
In order to get back into the Senate, he will have to win a primary fight against Jonathan Steitz, a conservative financial planner. Steitz posted solid fundraising numbers in the first campaign finance report of the contest match-up. Democrats have abandoned the district – the incumbent is running for lieutenant governor – and redistricting makes the seat one the GOP can win and hold after this election.
Lingering doubts about Wanggaard’s conservative credentials dog him, and his weakness on collective bargaining reform is not quickly forgotten. While Wanggaard did eventually ditch his effort to change Walker’s plan and voted to pass the legislation, it wasn’t until after the Governor, his aides and conservatives pushed him over the line with much cajoling and convincing.
According to an October 2013 report by the John K. MacIver Institute, the collective bargaining and pension and health insurance contribution reforms of Act 10 have saved Wisconsin taxpayers $2.7 billion. Savings will continue to accrue because there is no sunset provision on the reforms.
Some supporters of Wanggaard assert that if he gets back into the state Senate he will have a more conservative voting record. Wanggaard, they explain, had to push back against conservative ideas because he represented a swing district. But according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wanggaard has said he will not swing to the right in his legislating even if he represents a much more conservative district.
“Wanggaard — who was lobbied by Democrats and unions during the fight over collective bargaining — said if elected again to represent very different voters he would approach legislating the same way,” wrote the paper’s top two state politics reporters last month.
For Republicans looking to back Walker in his continued pursuit of conservative reforms, that’s not good news if Wanggaard gets back into the Senate.
