Not sure if I agree with this or not:
After a 36-day stay in Illinois, Indiana House Democrats came back tonight. And while they're touting certain compromises the GOP made as proof that their standoff was successful, it's not so clear they won much more than would have been achieved if they had never left the state.
“The only real concession is the right-to-work bill is dead,” says Mike O'Brien, a blogger at Capitol & Washington and a former legislative director for Gov. Mitch Daniels. “But that bill was declared dead 24 hours after the walkout began. The cap on vouchers, the limits on project labor agreements — those were all in play before the walkout began.”
“What Democrats did today is they took a bunch of compromises that were already in progress before the walkout and declared them the reason that the walkout ended,” O'Brien adds.
If that's true, it's puzzling why the Democrats stayed out so long and why they finally decided to come back. The post says they might have been swayed by the fact that 66 percent of the public was against them. But that figure comes from a poll released by Republicans, so it's somewhat suspect. I think the walkout mostly hardened pre-existing partisan passions, though it might have persuaded a few moderate fence-sittings to jump off on the GOP side.
Democrats are crowing that they won concessions, and Republicans are just saying they're glad everybody can get back to work now. A lot of observers are going to think there was a backroom deal in one of those hookups between Pat Bauer and Brian Bosma, and they'll be looking for evidence of it until the session ends.
And before we try to get a final take on how the public sees all this, let's wait until it sinks in for everybody how much this little stunt is going to cost taxpayers.
