The Washington Examiner explains how Michigan Democrats and the SEIU (though I repeat myself) conspired to make those who accept Meicaid payments to help pay for the health care of their disabled adult children “state employees”, with the requisite $30/month kickba…er, dues payment to the SEIU automatically deducted from the Medicaid payment.
We came quite close to having the same thing happen in Wisconsin. One of the things the Democrats did shortly after they seized control of the Assembly following the 2008 elections (and thus the entirety of the lawmaking apparatus) was ram through union recognition of “independent home care workers”. They came within a defection of the then-Senate Democrat/Majority leader of ratifying said contract.
How could anyone who proposed/voted/allowed this think that it was never going to come back to bite them? It just seems so beyond the pale that anyone could think this would never see the light of day…
On the Michigan side, it was all former governor Jennifer Granholm (D-Canada), who never thought that a majority of Michigan voters would object to becoming South Canada.
On the Wisconsin side, the DPW thought that the 2006/2008 elections were a mandate from Hades itself (look at Healthy and Depopulated Wisconsin, proposed by the Senate Democrats in 2007 when they didn’t even have the Assembly). I don’t know precisely what constituted a “independent home care worker” in the FY2010-FY2011 budget (the hotel wifi choked on sending me the PDF version of 2009 Act 28, which the Dems used as the vehicle to introduce unionization of said workers) or the not-quite-ratified contract (the ratifying bill, AB995, only referenced the existence of the contract, and the attached fiscal estimate only noted an annual net additional cost of $622,000 due mostly to a new $9/hr minimum wage).
One thing I didn’t mention yesterday was that, up until governor Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature got Act 10 implemented, Wisconsin would have automatically deducted the union dues from whoever it considered “covered public employees”, just like Michigan.