I've taken a much needed break from political writing/thinking towards the end of the weekend. Then I started thinking about why, exactly, weekends have been so draining lately.
When Scott Walker announced the Budget Repair Bill, many sources commented on his tactic of releasing it on a Friday afternoon, in order to miss the weekday news cycle and get buried in the weekend, and then pushed through on Tuesday.
And obviously, this backfired. The unions took advantage of those two days (Saturday and Sunday) to plan a massive lobby day and protest for Tuesday and Wednesday. When the JFC announced that it would hold a hearing on the bill on Tuesday morning, hundreds of union members were already planning on skipping work and coming to Madison.
Still, many of the big moments of the last six weeks have been on Fridays. Although the bill was passed on a Thursday evening, it was signed on Friday. Actually, it was signed on Friday morning...but the official signing ceremony (mistakenly billed as a "singing" ceremony; I still find that to be humorous) was held on a Friday afternoon.
The last-minute "stunning" "twist" of the LRB's publication of Act 10 (and the Administration's contention that it is, in fact, law now) happened on a Friday afternoon, too.
It's as if the Republican leadership believes that we get all of our news from the morning paper. Maybe they haven't heard about Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and email. It's increasingly hard to bury things in the news cycle (and, I will also give credit, our local media has recognized that these things are important, and not let the stories drop). After that initial weekend, there have almost always been major protests planned for Saturdays (until 3/26, when the plans were smaller). Why try to push something through on Friday afternoon, when it just adds more fuel to a righteously angry crowd the next morning?
More to the point, it gives us time to plan. To organize a strategy to fight against the perpetual erosion of local control, workers' rights, and increasingly consolidated power of the governor. And mostly, this is what we've done. This weekend was the first time when that felt less true; we had intentionally stopped the major protesting in order to focus on recall petitions, Supreme Court campaigning, and other strategies for the ballot. We stayed focused, mostly...but I also think we got distracted by the "publishing" of the law. We didn't wait to see who would believe that it was law and who wouldn't (so far, the tally is that the Republican administration, including DOA, and the Dept of Justice, believe that it is law, and the LRB who published it, and the Legislative Council, plus a few DAs and the Secretary of State, believe that it is not yet law). We had the whole weekend, though, and by now, things feel back to focus: we know which lawsuits to launch or continue, depending on whether Act 10 is or is not the law.
But that's neither here nor there.
The point is, the Republicans continue to try to sneak things past us on Friday afternoons. Therefore, I propose that we should all automatically plan to converge on the Capitol from after lunch until closing, on Fridays. We can be there when the news comes down. We can tell our legislators what we think. And then, once we are all gathered, we can discuss the implications. We can divide the work of researching various elements, and the work of creating strategies, and the work of maintaining the strategies we are currently using.
In other words, let's build something, and let's not wait for news cycles, or wait for the sneaky maneuvers that will surely come. Especially as we head into the discussions over the Biennial Budget (which is just as important - this is where the money is, and it could be the first time that we won't be able to bargain for our working terms), we need to be prepared. And not prepared in a paranoid way. Prepared in the way that means we'll already be able to mobilize with clarity of purpose *and* tactic.
So. What are you doing on Friday afternoon?
(okay. this coming friday is april fools day. so really, friday? hell yeah!)
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