WOODSTOCK, Ill. — Bob Jauch was here.Poor baby. This isn't exactly The Fugitive, you know. He could end all this tomorrow by simply going back to work.
The Democratic state senator from Poplar and the rest of the 14 senators who escaped from Wisconsin spent parts of several days last week in this charming northern Illinois town of 22,000 where the movie “Groundhog Day” was filmed.
That movie, in which Bill Murray’s character was stuck in a single day, resonates with Jauch, who has been stuck for more than a week on an unplanned odyssey in his native state.
“It is the same thing,” Jauch said in an interview on Friday morning in a motel room in suburban Chicago. “You take the same precautions. You look in the rear-view mirror. You wonder who’s watching you.”
Day after day, since Feb. 18, Jauch, 65, has been waking up somewhere in Illinois, avoiding any possibility of being forced to vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill, which Jauch considers an outrageous assault on working people.
He hasn’t just been in Illinois — he and his colleagues have been moving around from place to place in a bizarre game of hide-and-seek. The seekers are Tea Party members who want the
senators to return to Wisconsin and vote on Walker’s bill. At least one of the Democrats has to show up to give the Senate the quorum it needs to take that vote. It’s a legislative journey unlike any Jauch, who was elected to the Wisconsin Assembly in 1982 and the Senate in 1986, has experienced.
But why be so evasive? When asked what he’s afraid of, Jauch doesn’t flinch.
“Those Tea Party folks are very harassing,” Jauch said, in an interview conducted under the agreement that the specific location wouldn’t be revealed. “They’re very intimidating. They’re in your face. They don’t care about anything that goes on in Wisconsin, and they’re very disruptive.”
So the senators meet in one location, sleep in other locations and meet with media in still other locations. Invariably, the Tea Party catches up with them, and they switch to new locations.
He might as well enjoy his last years in office. He probably won't win another election in his lifetime.
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1 comment:
"“They’re very intimidating. They’re in your face. They don’t care about anything that goes on in Wisconsin,..."
He's wrong, there, and we know one thing those Tea Partiers care about in Wisconsin. He does, too--which is why he's in Illinois.
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