In Michigan, new GOP leaders made the state the first in more than 50 years to scale back state-level unemployment benefits. They reduced the length of time workers could receive benefits from 26 weeks to 20. Conservatives in Florida and Missouri soon followed.
Social legislation found plenty of success, too. Indiana, where Republicans took control of the legislature, became the first state to cut off government funding for Planned Parenthood. It was one of dozens of new GOP-supported laws around the country curtailing abortion rights. In Alabama, where Republicans retained the governor’s office and took control of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, lawmakers passed an immigration crackdown that goes even further than last year’s lightning-rod measure in Arizona. Newly empowered Republicans required voters to show photo ID in Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, with dozens of similar measures being debated around the country.
"Frankly, we didn’t stand a chance of stopping it," says South Carolina state Representative Joseph Neal, a Democrat. A year ago, South Carolina Democrats filibustered the same bill. This year, Republicans managed to push it through.
Public workers targeted
Perhaps more than any other issue, this year’s state legislative sessions are likely to be defined in the public consciousness by the GOP-led clampdown on public workers. The movement sparked furious protests that began in February in the snow-covered streets of Madison and Columbus but soon spilled over into capitals as far afield as Maine and Texas. Collectively, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to register their unhappiness with what they saw as a blind-side attack on unions and public employees by overreaching Republican majorities.
Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin — all of them run by Republicans after November’s elections — passed measures limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees. Given the Midwest’s long pro-union history, such measures would have been unthinkable under Democratic or mixed-party rule.
In Indiana and Wisconsin, minority Democrats took the almost unheard-of step of fleeing the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass their legislation, though both states eventually passed measures anyway. Indiana limited bargaining rights for teachers, while Wisconsin approved a much broader limitation of bargaining rights for teachers, state workers and others. Wisconsin’s new law is being challenged in court, and protesters and counter-protesters are engineering a series of highly unusual recall elections in an attempt to oust lawmakers on both sides of the issue, as well as Governor Scott Walker.
In Ohio, where Republican Governor John Kasich signed an even tougher collective bargaining measure than Wisconsin’s, opponents are vowing to repeal the new law with a referendum in November. In Tennessee, where Republican Governor Bill Haslam’s victory in November gave the GOP complete control of state government for the first time since 1869, lawmakers responded by eliminating many collective bargaining rights for teachers and creating a new bargaining process called “collaborative conferencing.” Unions complained that it would give them a fraction of their former rights.
But it was not just collective bargaining limits that infuriated public workers. More broadly, teachers saw wide-ranging changes to K-12 classrooms as an attack on their livelihoods.
In Texas, teachers protested by the tens of thousands in March as the Republican-dominated legislature pressed forward with what is likely to be a $4 billion cut to K-12 education, threatening thousands of teacher jobs. Florida and Nevada modified teacher tenure rules, making layoffs easier.
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