Looking for a road back to normalcy in the Wisconsin state Senate. He won’t say how many, but Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald met with “a couple” Senate Democrats, at their invitation, on Monday. “They called me and said ‘would meet us down at the state line’ and I said ‘yeah, I’ll met you down there’, so yesterday I drove down to Kenosha and we met and I thought it was a good discussion and was productive,” said Fitzgerald following Tuesday’s abbreviated Senate floor session.
Fitzgerald also would not say who the Democrats were – but that Minority Leader Mark Miller was not among them. And no, Fitzgerald did not bring a state trooper to the meeting, which did take place in Wisconsin. “It was in Kenosha. Did they ask if I was going to bring a trooper? No they never asked me that. I think there was an understanding that I wasn’t going to bring, it wasn’t a gotcha thing, it was really to sit down and just have a discussion, face to face.”
Fitzgerald said he and the unnamed Democrats swapped some ideas. “It wasn’t real heavy, it was light actually. We kind of discussed stuff, and we joked with each other about the situation they find themselves in and the situation we’re in,” said Fitzgerald. “It was clear that there’s many of them that are trying to get back. They want this to over with. They’re trying to get back to the Capitol, and we’re trying to help them.” The 14 state Senate Democrats left Wisconsin on Thursday, February 17th, in order to deny majority Republicans the quorum needed for a vote on Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.