A funny thing happened on the way to the 2016 presidential race.
Scott Walker suddenly remembered how enthusiastic he is about "right to work" laws.
When Walker was running for re-election as governor of Wisconsin in 2014, he was frequently asked if he would sign so-called "right to work" legislation, which is designed to weaken unions and undermine the voices of workers on the job and in public life. Despite his reputation as an anti-labor zealot, Walker dodged the question again and again and again.
A month before the 2014 election, at a point when the polls were close and Walker was running for his political life, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreported that Walker "won't say if he would veto right-to-work legislation barring private-sector workers from having to join a union as part of their job."
The Associated Press reported three weeks before the election that "Walker says he won't push to make Wisconsin a right to work state or expand the Act 10 collective bargaining law if elected to a second term."
As Election Day approached, Walker went further. He claimed he had told Republican legislators not to send him that legislation. Recalling the historic protests that arose four years ago when he attacked the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions, Walker warned that raising the "right to work" issue would "bring the whole firestorm back."
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"Those aren't the sorts of debates that are helpful for us to take the next step forward," said the governor, as he made his case for re-election. "It's about the tenor and the tone of the Legislature and what it means to the state as a whole."
Every indication from Walker suggested that he wanted the issue to go away. "Right-to-work," the governor declared, was "not something that's part of my agenda."
"My point is I'm not pushing for it," he said. "I'm not supporting it in this session."
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Plenty of Walker critics in the labor movement and the legislature expressed skepticism about the governor's temperate statements. After all, when one of his wealthiest supporters, Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, had asked in 2011 about making Wisconsin a "right to work" state, Walker was caught on tape replying: "The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer." That did not sound like a man who had any qualms about signing anti-labor legislation.
Yet, throughout the high-stakes 2014 campaign, the governor stuck to his newly moderate line, presenting himself as a smart manager who wanted to get things right rather than the rigid ideologue of the 2011 conflict.
That was then. This is now.
Walker's not worrying about Wisconsin these days. He's in a new race -- scrambling to win the support of 2016 Republican presidential caucus-goers and primary voters who like their candidates to take a hard line on social and economic issues.
So Walker's line just got a whole lot harder.
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