So, the Wisconsin State Senate just pulled the anti-union provisions out of the budget bill, and then, since they did not require a quorum, since they were non-budgetary, they passed it with an 18-1 vote.

I will note that the motion appears to be in violation of the state constitution:

The measure approved Wednesday forbids most government workers from collectively bargaining for wage increases beyond the rate of inflation. It also requires public workers to pay more toward their pensions and double their health insurance contribution, a combination equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker.

Those savings would appear to be budgetary to me, and hence subject to the state constitution’s quorum requirement.

Firedog Lake’s invaluable David Dayen has some more of the finer points, and it appears that this is definitely headed to court, though the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is heavily Republican.

If you want to donate to the recall efforts, you can go to my Act Blue Page. There is a link there for donations.

Also note that in the middle of the most important fight for ordinary working Americans in decades, the Obama administration has decided that they don’t want to be involved:

Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.

I guess that someone in the administration finds unions, and ordinary working people to be icky. After all, they expect to spend a billion dollars in 2012 on the Presidential election, and the working man just does not have that kind of money.

Barack Obama is very lucky that the Republicans are as awful as they are, because otherwise, as awful as he is, he’d have a serious primary challenger right now.

What can I say, when Mitt Romney is the class act in the room, you have a very scary political party.