>> Union busting.

>> Governor Scott Walker enacted his signature act 10 in 2011, bringing massive protests to the state Capitol on the part of as many as 100,000 public employees.

The law stripped union protections and demanded employee contributions to pensions and health care.

Here's what our colleagues at Inside Wisconsin Politics had to say about it.

>> Wisconsin Act ten is back in the news.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court says it will hear a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin Act ten.

Zac, how big a deal is this and why now?

>> Why now?

Seems fairly coincidental that this just comes out after the election.

There was a lot of speculation about whether the Supreme Court would weigh in on taking this case up again before the election, and whether that would impact how people might vote.

There's always a news dump that comes right after the election.

We saw that with gubernatorial Milwaukee County executive politics with the Supreme Court.

That's no different.

Act ten is about to turn 16 years old.

And, Shawn, you and I remember that we were there the entire time.

It was a big deal.

Democrats have been trying to repeal it ever since, and they haven't been able to do it legislatively.

They've they've tried in the courts.

They've tried in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, federal court, and they've lost both times.

This is a third route.

This is a lawsuit filed a couple of years ago.

A Dane County judge overturned portions abeyance.

And then a more conservative appellate court recently this summer ruled that, no, there was no reason to overturn the law.

Now, the court's going to hear the full decision.

The reason it's interesting is Democrats finally have the vote in the legislature to overturn act ten if they want.

So there's a question of will the court get to this first?

And will Democrats allow the court to go first, or will the court just sit on this because they don't have to move fast at all?

In fact, they're not going to and wait to see what happens in the Capitol, which may render their entire case moot.

>> Ana what kind of strikes me with this is that the legislature could take this signal from the court and say, we're just going to stand back and let the court do its thing?

They could say, like, you know, this lawsuit, I think is important to to work its way through.

I don't hear them saying that, actually, I hear Democratic leaders, Greta Neubauer saying, we're going to move forward on this quickly.

Why?

>> I mean, and they've kind of it's interesting.

They've kind of danced around a lot of the potential issues that they might take up when they take power in January.

This was not one of them.

On the first day that Greta Neubauer was elected to leadership in the Assembly and Dianne Hesselbein in the Senate, they both talked about this being a really kind of important issue for them.

And then after the court said it would hear this case, Greta Neubauer came back on our program on Wisconsin today and reiterated that the legislature is still going to to take it up.

So there could be several reasons for this.

You know, one thing is that act ten sounds like a very sort of like neat, clean, discrete thing.

Laws are very unwieldy and big.

The court could rule very, very broadly or very narrowly.

So depending on what happens there.

They might want to do a whole lot of other things to kind of not just overturn what happened when act ten went into place, but then also kind of shore up union rights more broadly.

And so we'll see kind of what that actual package looks like.

Is it just a, oh, we want to undo exactly what Scott Walker did.

And, you know, as they say, kind of turn the page on the Walker era or do we want to kind of affirmatively also put forward, you know, the Neubauer Hesselbein agenda?

this was a the landmark law, really, of Governor Scott Walker's era.

And I think for a long time, it felt like it would be here forever that that he had kind of done away with this chapter of organized labor.

And it unions would have to do something else in Wisconsin.

So what are Republicans saying now that they're seeing this pillar of the Walker years kind of starting to crumble?

>> Well, they see the writing on the wall.

I mean, with the Democratic majorities talking about going in that direction and with the Supreme Court, you know, the Liberal majority on the Supreme Court is just so big right now.

And like, you know, could potentially go even bigger in April.

So what they're doing is they're shouting from the rooftops, essentially saying that this is going to cost a lot of money, getting rid of act ten.

They estimate they claim it's going to cost $2 billion, and that'll be borne by school districts and local governments.

And there's going to be budget holes all over the place.

So they've also been pointing to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty that has done a study on this.

And they've also got an online calculator where people can put in their information and it tells them, you know, an estimate of what they've saved because of that.

>> Along with statewide ballot questions, voters in