June is usually a sleepy month during any presidential election, but not this year. Two events this month will not only affect the outcome of the presidential election, but also have a dramatic impact on the direction of the country, no matter who wins in November.
On June 5, Wisconsin voters will decide whether or not to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The vote will be the culmination of an 18-month campaign by big labor to thwart Walker’s public sector union reforms, which are already loosening the stranglehold that the unions had on state and local budgets. With just a week before the election, Walker leads his Democratic challenger, Tom Barrett, by 6 points, according to an average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.
Should Walker win, the ramifications will go far beyond Wisconsin. Walker’s ability to survive a well-funded recall effort in a bluish state that is likely to vote for President Obama would send a message to governors in cash-strapped states throughout the nation. They will be more likely to confront their unions, too.
Beyond that, a Walker win would prove to politicians at the state and federal level that voters will not only tolerate but reward leaders who take a stand on “third rail” issues and remain firm in the face of protests, threats and special-interest scare tactics.
Because Walker followed through in implementing his reforms, Wisconsin parents with school aged children had a full academic year to see that none of the dire warnings the unions had made about his policies ever came true. Instead, local governments saved money with the added flexibility the reforms gave them, and property taxes went down for the first time in many years.
A Marquette Law School poll released earlier this month found that by a 50 percent to 43 percent margin, Wisconsin voters want to preserve Walker’s public sector union reforms that triggered the recall. Among independents, 53 percent surveyed said they were against repealing the reforms and going back to the pre-Walker status quo, compared to just 38 percent who wanted to undo the reforms.
That’s the first big event in June. The second will likely come a few weeks later. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law near the end of the month. The basic options before them are whether to uphold the whole law, overturn the whole law or strike down parts of it.
Even if the court merely overturns the mandate forcing individuals to purchase government-approved insurance policies, it would reshuffle the political deck ahead of the presidential election. Suddenly, Mitt Romney would have an easy retort to Obama’s efforts to tie the national health care law to the one Romney signed in Massachusetts — namely that the Massachusetts law was done in a constitutionally permissible way. Such a ruling would also strengthen the attack on Obama’s handling of the economy, because he will have spent more than a year of his presidency pushing health care legislation that turned out to be a waste of time.
Beyond the immediate political implications of the decision, any ruling against the Obama administration would have tremendous policy implications as well. Depending on the scope of the ruling, it would make a legislative repeal process either less arduous or completely unnecessary. And the decision will have sweeping implications for individual liberty by determining whether there are, indeed, still limits on Congressional power.
November may be the climax of this year’s election, but June will be the pivotal month.
Philip Klein is senior editorial writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
