GOP Tires Of Talk And Wants Violence

It's been nearly a hundred years since Americans routinely-chose violence to settle labor disputes, so people may be unprepared for what might happen next, but it looks to me like the GOP, with its permanently-inflated sense of executive dominion and privilege, has decided to stop talking altogether and reach for the gun. Governor Walker's warnings about violence have much more to do with his plans to get violent than with anything the labor movement might threaten. A self-fulfilling prophecy, aided by the GOP's permanent, Rovian predilection to project upon its foes the evil plans it wishes to accomplish itself.

Violence is not democracy's friend:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has declared war on state workers, almost literally.

First, he proposed a state budget that would cut retirement and healthcare for workers like teachers and nurses, and strip away nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. But even more significantly, he announced last Friday that he had alerted the National Guard to be ready for state workers to strike or protest, an unprecedented step in modern times.

This would be the first time in nearly 80 years that the National Guard would be used to break a strike by Wisconsin workers, and the first time in over 40 years that the National Guard would be used against public workers anywhere in the country. The last time was the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

...The use of the National Guard against workers is supposed to be a relic of the past, nearly unimaginable to us. That's because of an uneasy understanding, evolved over time, between citizens and the state over the use of state force against civilians. In her excellent book "Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980," historian Joan Jensen argued that this understanding "maintained restraint, sometimes precariously, in using the army to defend the government from the domestic population."

In other words, Jensen argues that the concept of voluntary restraint by the executive branch -- as opposed to codified legal restraint -- is still largely the governing principle at work when deciding whether to mobilize a domestic military force. So Gov. Walker's action is significant because it is an expanded interpretation of the power of the executive office. This would introduce once again the idea that a governor could use the military to impose his personal, political will on a state.