The Wall Street Journal reports:
With Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker maintaining a hard line on his budget bill and Democratic senators refusing to return to Madison to vote, attention is turning to a group of moderate Republican senators to negotiate a compromise to the stalemate that has drawn thousands of protesters to the state capital for a sixth straight day. The proposal, written by Sen. Dale Schultz and first floated in the Republican caucus early last week, calls for most collective bargaining rights of public-employee unions to be eliminated—per Mr. Walker's bill—but then reinstated in 2013, said Mr. Schultz's chief of staff Todd Allbaugh. "Dale is committed to find a way to preserve collective bargaining in the future," said Mr. Allbaugh in a telephone interview.
Robert Costa reports that this morning on MSNBC, Walker rejected the proposal, saying “We can’t do a short-term fix.” As the Journal notes, "it is not clear that Democrats would accept" Schultz's watered-down legislation.