Walker and the state's Republican senators, as you've surely heard by now, decoupled their proposal to strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights from a budget bill, allowing them to push it through the upper chamber with the entire Democratic caucus still holed up across state lines in Illinois. The GOP-controlled Assembly will presumably pass the bill today and Walker will then sign it.

Politically, this represents a wholly reckless move. Wisconsin's state government has been paralyzed for weeks because of the collective bargaining impasse, and in that time public opinion swung sharply against Walker and his plan. All of the noise generated by the Democrats' resistance seemed to have convinced a majority that Walker's plan is out of the mainstream. That these same voters will now hear that Walker and the GOP resorted to an extraordinary measure to jam it through will only harden this assessment -- and, potentially, make GOP legislators and the governor himself vulnerable to recall efforts.

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Take Wisconsin's ideological reputation. The Badger State is home to Madison, the Upper Midwest's answer to Berkeley and Cambridge, and it's produced several progressive icons, like "Fighting Bob" La Folette, who won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote on the Progressive ticket in the 1924 presidential election, and Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day. Plus, it was one of the very few states to side with Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race, when the Duke was swamped in a 40-state landslide -- and one of only five to vote Democratic in each of the last six White House campaigns. Viewed against this backdrop, it's inconceivable that Wisconsin would turn its back on Feingold.

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Nor is it the first time Feingold has faced a difficult fall race. In his three successful Senate campaigns, his winning margins have been seven, two and 12 points and he's never secured more than 56 percent of the vote. It's tempting to think that this battle-tested past will help Feingold survive this year, but there's a big -- and potentially decisive -- difference between his previous campaigns and this year's: the national climate. Never before has he run with swing voters so predisposed to vote against the Democratic Party, and with such an apparent enthusiasm gap between the two parties' bases.

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Heroes

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If conditions stay extremely favorable to the GOP, then it's very possible that control of the House of Representatives could flip. The universe of House seats that could be in serious play is larger than the margin between the two parties. On the other hand, the economy could start sinking again and it still probably wouldn't change control of the Senate. No matter how bad a year is ahead for Democrats, the structural constraints of senatorial elections make it virtually impossible for a change in party control -- especially given some recent developments.

Republicans need to pick up 10 seats in the Senate to install Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as the majority leader. Even with the assumption that they knock off every possible target, and hold all of their vulnerable seats, it still looks like they'll need a wild card or two. And those seem to be slipping away.

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A Rasmussen poll published on Thursday has progressive favorite Sen. Russ Feingold trailing potential Republican challenger Tommy Thompson 47 percent to 43 percent.

(Yes, it’s Rasmussen, and yes, because they use a likely voter model, their surveys tend to spot Republicans a couple points – but they were also the first pollster to show that Scott Brown had a real chance in Massachusetts, so at this point it seems like a bad idea for Democrats to dismiss their doomsday predictions out-of-hand.)

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It’s early yet, but it’s looking like major progressive figures are feeling cautiously optimistic about the compromise Reid has crafted. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has been a major public option advocate all along. Of the new proposal, he says, “I’ve got a smile on my face. I don't smile naturally.” However, Rockefeller’s Senate colleague Russ Feingold, D-Wis., isn’t quite as happy a camper. In a comment given to the New York Times, Feingold expressed some disapproval -- though he didn't actually promise to vote against a bill. “I do not support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach,” Feingold said. 

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It is not the first time Feingold has gone out on a political limb. In September, he was the only Democratic senator with presidential ambitions to support John Roberts. He was the only senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act. Before that, he spent nearly a decade fighting the culture of political payola, a fight he won in 2002 with passage of the McCain-Feingold legislation.

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"Not good," said Aron, after the ranking Democrat on the committee, Patrick Leahy, announced his support of Roberts. "Ask the woman in black and white. She is doing a lot better." Aron nodded in the direction of Andrea Lafferty, the executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, who has made a career fighting against the rights of homosexuals to marry. Lafferty, wearing a zebra-inspired blouse, did appear ebullient.

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Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Bob "The Torch" Torricelli, D-N.J., offered a stronger substitute amendment -- which would have replaced McCain-Feingold with the much more comprehensive House version of the bill, offered and passed in the House by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass. A similar bill failed to get 60 Senate votes in February 1998 and the new amendment, should it replace the bill from Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., will certainly fail again.

The surprising move had Capitol Hill scrambling for answers and the staffs of the four leading campaign finance reformers confused as to what, exactly, Daschle and Torricelli were doing, and what was motivating them to do it.

"We always knew they [the Democrats] were going to try something like this," McCain said in an interview Friday afternoon. "Everyone in Washington wants to keep the status quo."

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Since Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That's when the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Accountability and Rehabilitation Act passed the Senate, 73-25, with nearly unanimous Democratic support. And while debate over the gun-control provisions in the act, known as the juvenile justice bill, received much fanfare and media ballyhoo, what is less well-known are the conservative Republican measures that constitute the larger share of it.

These were provisions that Democrats in the Senate had adamantly opposed last year, creating an impasse on legislative action and sticking the bill in senatorial purgatory. Then known as S10, the bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee but it never hit the Senate floor because so many Democrats found much of the bill irreparably odious.

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And then he showed me that he was a mere mortal.

In Tuesday, in response to a question about what he would do if he were president in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, McCain told me, "It's obvious that at a gun show people should be subject to background checks. I don't get it why in stores you get a background check, but you go three blocks down, there's no background checks."

There's a loophole in the existing gun control laws, I noted, because the gun lobby argued successfully to exempt gun shows.

"Well, it should be closed," McCain responded.

But a day later, on Wednesday, McCain voted to kill an amendment from Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would have closed that very loophole. The largely party-line vote was 51-47. Six Republicans voted for the measure. McCain was not among them. This after reports that the four guns used in the Columbine killings had been purchased at gun shows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained, "It's like the NRA lives in here."

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