After several days of growing rallies in Madison and throughout the state, dozens of schools have already been canceled for Thursday Feb 17th setting the stage for more action at the Capitol tomorrow. Today's rallies were estimated to draw anywhere from 15-30,000 people and expectations are that those numbers will grow tomorrow as a result of a statewide show of solidarity with public employees.
As of this evening the Joint Finance Committee is meeting to consider some token amendments that will go nowhere toward backing off the assault on collective bargaining rights of public employees. It's speculated that the changes to Governor Walker's initial proposal are to include sunset provisions in which collective bargaining rights are revoked for 2 years. There is no reason to expect that those sunsets will actually be implemented as they rarely are.
In a bizarre twist, UW-Madison officials have raised alarms that the biennial budget proposal the governor presents next week will attempt to spin of the flagship university from the rest of the UW System. It's unclear what this proposal seeks to achieve but it's raised the stakes by engaging Wisconsin's higher education deeper into the fray.
The Republicans in the State Senate most likely to receive heavy pressure from public employees are those representing the western parts of the state, Dale Schultz of Richland Center and Dan Kapanke of La Crosse.
Follow developments in realtime on Twitter via #wiunion
