Judge tosses Wisconsin union reform: Why judges are dismantling the GOP agenda

A year after Wisconsin exploded in protest over Republican legislation to gut collective bargaining for public employees, a Wisconsin judge has nullified the law, ruling on Friday that it violates workers’ equal rights under the Constitution.

Those dramatic union reforms and the political theater it sparked last year turned Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker into a Republican hero and helped balance the state’s budget.

The new rules, which curtailed bargaining rights for most unionized public employees, also sparked protests and sit-ins at the Wisconsin capitol and resulted in a recall effort that Governor Walker survived earlier this year, all of which seemed to cement majority political agreement with the Republican political agenda.

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With its focus on a signature Republican law, Friday’s ruling also highlights a series of state and federal rulings over the past year that have turned back major tenets of a Republican agenda fueled by the massive electoral victories the party brought home in November 2010, when it took over the House of Representatives and won nine governorships. Subsequently, a large number of state voter ID laws, immigration laws, and redistricting laws passed by Republicans since 2010 have faltered or failed in the courts.

There are notable exceptions. A Pennsylvania judge, for example, upheld that state’s tough Republican-backed voter ID law, and federal judges have largely allowed a central tenet – the so-called “papers please” provisions – passed by states in the wake of Arizona’s SB1070 law, while striking down other parts of those laws.

But from Florida to Texas, the court rejections of conservative laws show that the Republican revolution of 2010 has underscored political “overreach” by Republican majorities that courts have little choice but to dismantle, Rice University political scientist Mark Jones told the San Antonio Express-News this week.

That “hubris or ignorance” by Republican majorities, he adds, has already had more serious backlash for the party’s legislative agenda.

In Texas, for example, a ruling by a panel of federal judges this month that a redistricting map had “discriminatory intent” against the booming Hispanic population’s voting power reconfirmed for many that Texas is not ready to be released from federal supervision under Voting Rights Act.

Republicans acknowledge that they are pushing the envelope, but disagree that what they see as a mandate from voters constitutes overreach.

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