Dick Morris: Children at Stake in Wisconsin

Veteran political analyst and best-selling author Dick Morris says the battle between Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employees unions is in fact a fight pitting “schoolchildren versus the unions.”

During Morris’ appearance Monday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Hannity referred to a headline in The Washington Post Monday citing the “new union battle” between government workers and American taxpayers.

“Throughout U.S. history, the most prominent union clashes largely involved employees squaring off against big corporate owners over how to share profits,” the Post observed. “The recent state budget controversies feature union members bargaining against state and local governments over wages and benefits provided by taxpayers.”

Said Morris: “It’s even worse than that. It’s the schoolchildren versus the unions, because when Walker speaks about restricting collective bargaining to wages and benefits what he’s really saying is, let’s not have it include teacher tenure and merit pay and school choice. Let’s permit us to do that stuff even within the context of the collective bargaining agreements.

“He’s already exempted cops and firemen, so this is basically about collective bargaining with teachers.

“And I think he’s going to increasingly change this debate from the unions against the taxpayers, which is great, to the unions against the schoolchildren, because that’s what it’s really all about.

“What’s at stake here really is freeing our schools so we can keep good teachers and fire bad ones, freeing our state government so we don’t have high local taxes, and obliterating the financial power base of the Democratic Party.”

Morris’ latest book, “Revolt! How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs,” co-authored with Eileen McGann, is being published this week.

Discussing the ongoing fight to rein in public employee unions in several states, Morris read from the book: “We may at long last have a way to liberate our nation from the domination of those who should be our public servants but instead are frequently our union masters, and free our politics from their financial power.”

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