Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:21 and sunset is 7:27, for 13 hours, 6 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 5 PM and the Whitewater Common Council at 6 PM.
On this day in 1864, Union forces enter Atlanta as the city surrenders, ending the Atlanta campaign as a victory for General William T. Sherman.
Was Monday, September 1, 2025, the last Labor Day for the Walker era’s Act 10? That provision faces a likely Wisconsin Supreme Court decision:
A Dane County Circuit Court judge last year ruled that provisions of Act 10 were unconstitutional because the law treats public safety workers differently from other public employees. Judge Jacob Frost later ordered the restoration of collective bargaining powers for all public workers to what they were before Act 10 was adopted — a decision that appears all but certain to be decided by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has a 4-3 liberal majority.
Fresh off his 2010 victory, then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker in February 2011 unveiled his plan to sweep away decades of protections for state public employees as a way to address a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit. The proposal eventually became known as Act 10, and it hobbled public unions across Wisconsin and remains one of the most divisive measures in state history.
Act 10 effectively ended collective bargaining for most public-sector unions by limiting what they could negotiate over to base wage increases only, limiting those to a rate no greater than inflation.
See Mitchell Schmidt, This could be Wisconsin’s last Labor Day under Act 10, Wisconsin State Journal, September 1, 2025.
The Dane County Circuit Court decision (Judge Jacob Frost) is on appeal. Predicting judicial decisions is a dicey business, and I’ll not offer a prediction here.
(A generation ago, it would still have been clear to most libertarians that any person should be able to form any association, to bargain with any public or private institution. Those are simply rights of association. I’d say that few libertarians now see this, but it’s more accurate to say that there are few libertarians.)
It’s worth noting, however, that Act 10 and Wisconsin’s still-gerrymandered Congressional districts are among the only enduring accomplishments of Scott Walker’s tenure. The WEDC is a shadow of former self, with Foxconn now remembered only as a mistake everyone would like to forget.
What’s changed most in Wisconsin, however, is the party of which Walker is a member. The WISGOP is a far-right party now, lousy with conspiracy theories and nativism, into which Walker, always an awkward man, now only awkwardly fits.
The WISGOP has moved on, even if Wisconsin law has not, and even if the law will not. Disadvantaging some workers over others is weak tea for a party that routinely demands deporting some workers over others. Anti-union is a pale version of anti-immigrant. Today’s WISGOP embraces a more dystopian vision for Wisconsin, one in which Act 10 seems tepid by contrast.
The night sky for September 2025: