MADISON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Next month will be 10 years since demonstrators stayed at Wisconsin’s state capitol for weeks to protest against Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill.
Some people are suggesting Wednesday’s protest in Washington D.C. is similar to that one.
As the day’s events were unfolding on Capitol Hill, Republican State Rep. Jim Steineke of Kaukauna tells FOX 11 it was a familiar sight.
“It reminds me a lot of the actions that liberals in Wisconsin took back in 2011 when they stormed the capitol back then,” said Steineke, Assembly Majority Leader. “They took it over. It was despicable back then. It’s despicable now.”
“It was not a liberal movement,” said Toni Baeb, former president of the Green Bay Education Association.
“It was a movement about education and about a case and an issue that was important to educators and supporters of educators.”
Baeb spent weeks with the protesters in Madison. Back then she was the President of Green Bay’s teachers union. The 2011 protests were to try to stop Act 10, legislation that took away most collective bargaining rights for most of the state’s public employees.
“There were thousands of people at the Capitol at that time, but I would venture to say that nobody felt the kind of danger that we saw today at our nation’s capitol.”
“It was frightening,” said Steineke. “A lot of us were being personally threatened, our families were being threatened, our homes were being protested at in some cases.”
Steineke believes there’s a chance much of the Madison drama could have been avoided had Capitol Police evacuated the building on the first day of the protest before it was dark. It’s something police were able to do on Capitol Hill.
“Understandably people are upset by the results of the election, but this is not the way we do things in this country,” said Steineke.
“I hope that people will continue to protest when it’s right and to do it in the right manner in order to make the necessary changes that we want to see,” said Baeb.
The Mad
