Scott Walker signs last year's bill eliminating collective bargaining.
He didn't make such a show of repealing equal pay enforcement. (Darren Hauck/Reuters)
Way back in February, the Wisconsin state Assembly followed the state Senate in voting to repeal the enforcement part of the state's equal pay law. The legislature then waited more than a month to send the bill to Gov. Scott Walker for his signature.
He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Walker's office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Gee, do you think they're hoping this won't draw much attention?
Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have been lining up to say they think the Augusta National Golf Club should admit women. Just days ago, in the run-up to the Wisconsin presidential primary, Scott Walker was pretty much Romney's hero. Has the Etch-A-Sketch already shaken and wiped that one clean, or would the dividing line between discrimination against women that Romney supports and discrimination against women that he doesn't support fall somewhere between membership rules in Augusta and paychecks in Kenosha? Walker didn't make discrimination against women legal, after all. He just took away the legal recourse women who have been discriminated against previously had.
Walker's leading Democratic challengers, Kathleen Falk and Tom Barrett, condemned the move:
Falk said Walker has "turned back the clock for women across Wisconsin."
"As a woman and as a mother who worked full-time while raising my son, I know first-hand how important pay equity and health care are to women across Wisconsin," she said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
A spokesman for Barrett's campaign said that Walker's "ideological civil war includes a war on women, and repeal today of this protection against pay discrimination is a major step backwards for Wisconsin values and basic fairness."
Scott Walker wants his rollback of women's rights in Wisconsin to go unnoticed. But, especially with the recall election coming up, people need to know this. Make sure the word gets out by sharing this story over Facebook and Twitter or with your friends and family in Wisconsin. And
make a $5 donation to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to take the bill-signing pen out of his hand.
