Overnight In Madison

A couple of commenters on this post on FDL about questions of legality of the Republan-passed bill in Wisconsin had insights on what might be going on.

First, commenter Margaret:

Okay, here’s a possibility that occurred to me last night. What if the Republicans knew that there was no way this would stand up to legal scrutiny? What if this is a ruse to get the Democrats back in Madison so they can declare a quorum and pass the original bill?

That thought had occurred to me as well. At this point, though, it is not clear that state police or capitol police would obey an order from King Gov. Walker to arrest Democratic senators and bring them to the chamber. Here is a comment from Phoenix Woman in response to Margaret's:

That’s what the Senate Dems are suspecting, which is why they’re not coming back just yet.

Either that, or the Republicans are scrambling so hard and fast that they’re not bothering to check to make sure what they do can’t be immediately shot down. Their whole schtick has been to do nothing but blitzkrieg: Hit the Dems so fast that nobody knows what happened until afterwards. But the Dems’ denying them a quorum has slowed things down and built tremendous opposition to the GOP’s plans.

And another from Phoenix Woman:

There’s a reason that the current and former mayors of Madison joined the cops and firefighters at the Capitol to protest last night. The whole friggin’ town is against Walker and the state GOP. 

Walker tried to force the Madison police to clear the building last night – they refused. He then turned to the Dane County sheriff – and he refused. He was going to call out the national guard, but somebody on his staff must have told him that it would look really bad if he had national guard troops firing on cops and firefighters and mayors, so that ended up not happening.

(Emphasis mine.)

I'd like to think that this is the response of a free people to illegal antidemocratic (as well as anti-Democratic) actions: even the police refuse to take part in such actions. But I've been around long enough to know that this is not over yet.