i really appreciate you joining me in this history making moment where having all the particulars of where we go from here legislatively may not be something anyone has command of. i appreciate you guiding us this far. joining me now, rick badger, executive director of afs smee 40 of wisconsin. thanks for joining me. great to be with you. i wish it was under different circumstances. senator miller s statement says in 30 minutes, 18 state senators undid 50 years of civil rights in wisconsin. he also said tonight 18 senate republicans conspired to take government away from the people. where do you go from here? first off, isn t it breathtaking? it is just so incredible. and again, you re talking to a real live wisconsin badger, a product of public schools, product of a public university,
the actual so-called budget repair bill with this union provision of it severed from it. what does the senate need to do on that part of the bill and do they still need a quorum for that that would include democrats? yes, they clearly would need to have senate democrats present, because the requirement is you have to have three-fifths of those elected present to take that vote. well, representative barca, does that indicate to you then that senate democrats may continue to stay out of the state? no. i think, lawrence, that they are so outraged at this action that based on senator miller s comment and i talked to him briefly this evening, i think they now are going to come back to help to join us in leading this fight against this illegal, improper and unethical effort
people together, not divide people, but this governor has divided this state like we have never been divided before. our state believes in clean and open government. that is no longer possible, i don t believe, under governor walker and his extreme and radical agenda. in senator miller s statement tonight, his last line is tomorrow we will join the people of wisconsin in taking back their government. representative barca, are you telling us senator miller told you that he will return to wisconsin tomorrow? that is what was implied. we only talked for a few minutes because there was so little time in between the conference committee and when the senate went in, but i ll be talking to him as soon as i m off the line. i really appreciate you joining me in this history-making moment where having all the particulars of where we go from here legislatively may not be something anyone has command of. i appreciate you guiding us this
clearly the governor and republican leadership felt that they could never get public support behind this, which is why they went to this kind of a sham of a process, procedure. so we will go forward as senator miller stated. we will continue to fight. i believe now the wisconsin public, whether republican, democrat, independent, union, nonunion, see this for what it really is, taking away people s rights. and i can tell you one thing about wisconsin people. we understand fair play and have an innate sense of fairness. this is not right, this is not fair, and i don t think the wisconsin people are going to put up with this. rick badger, according to the e-mails we saw released yesterday, it looked as if the governor was very, very close to a compromise plan with the democrats. did people in the unions have any indication as today progressed that we were going to be here tonight with this story? well, first off, i don t think we were that close. with the selective release of e-mails,
democratic leader of the senate said tonight that tonight 18 senate republicans conspired to take government away from the people. he then also said tomorrow, we will join the people of wisconsin in taking back their government. i read that to mean that senator miller is on his way back to wisconsin like you are, and that the democratic senators will be back in wisconsin tomorrow. is that true? we re going to be getting together, i am going back to meet with them to talk and see what legal action can be taken. we think there was some notice they didn t do in trying to put this together. we think they may have been sloppy in their haes in trying to get this done. we are going to be looking at those options and we will be making an announcement after that is decided upon. you know, the story now isn t so much what we re going to do or where we stand, we stand with the workers as we always have. it is where the republicans are, and this watershed moment, the republicans, 18 of them, sho