Memo to Wisconsin Republicans: if you honestly think that something you’re about to do is so unpopular - and so offensive to people’s sense of basic fairness – that you think you’ll need to call in the National Guard to contain the people’s outrage, maybe you should stop and think twice about it.

That was our reaction to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he’s placed the state’s National Guard on alert in case his new assault on working families leads to “worker unrest.”

Walker said Friday that he updated emergency plans and alerted the National Guard just in case they are needed to ensure state services aren’t interrupted. His plan would remove collective bargaining rights for prison guards, but it would exempt local police and firefighters and the state patrol.

Walker spoke about his plan at a Capitol news conference under the watch of a heavier than usual police presence.

The GOP plan itself, at its most basic, would abolish the right of most public employees to collectively bargain. At all. Not for their health or other benefits, not for workplace safety protections, and not for any kind of fair process to handle complaints against an unscrupulous superior. Salary negotiations would be severely restricted as well. And if workers don’t like the decrees handed down by King Scott and his GOP jesters in the legislature, they’re fired.

Once the details of this GOP power-grab became clear, public anger began to boil over almost immediately, with nearly 15,000 outraged citizens converging on the capitol in Madison in advance of an expected Thursday vote on the plan:

The crowds in Madison will swell Wednesday. The city's schools are closing, as teachers take sick days to join the protests and buses packed with public employees roll into the city.

The protests, unprecedented in recent Wisconsin history, are being organized by union—the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the Wisconsin Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin and others—in anticipation of a Thursday vote on whether to give the governor powers that the senior member of the state legislature describes as nothing short of dictatorial.

As state Senate Democratic Leader Mark Miller explained in a statement this morning, Republican legislators who back the plan are making a mistake if they think the outrage is limited only to those employees who would be directly affected by the GOP proposal:

“Thousands of citizens, young and old, union and non-union, labor and management, from every corner of the state, have travelled to the Capitol over the last several days to exercise their right to speak to their elected officials. The Wisconsin way respects workers and brings people together to solve problems. The Governor and legislative Republicans have clearly made a serious overreach with their effort to take away the rights of nurses, teachers, child care workers, prison guards and other public workers to bargain with their employers.

I am immensely proud of my Democratic colleagues who stayed through the night to listen to the people, the public workers that made it possible for us to continue the hearing and the many, many men women and children who waited so patiently through the day and night for their opportunity to share their thoughts with us.”

Indeed, many private-sector employees, as well as others like police and firefighters whose jobs are exempted from the power-grab, joined the protests in Madison. Many were unnerved by the thought that if they stand on the sidelines today, maybe someday soon the National Guard will be called in to enforce new labor laws directed against them. But overwhelmingly, the sentiment even from the many conservative Republicans at today’s rally was that this assault on workers’ rights is not what they voted for in November:

AFSCME put Republican members of the union front and center Tuesday, with Mike Recklies, a correctional officer from from Republican-leaning Walworth County, reminding conservatives that “there is no bigger government than the one that takes away an individual’s rights and freedom—and that’s exactly what we’re seeing going on in Madison right now. The legislature needs to think hard about what it means to be an American and stop this Big Government power grab against individual rights.”

Brenda Klein, a food service worker from Green Bay, said: “I went to the polls last November and voted to protect our freedoms from government threat and to create jobs. I never dreamed that this would be the result. The bill being rammed through the legislature does the opposite and it must be stopped.”

Even some players for the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers, who as employees of a publicly-owned enterprise probably share a certain bond with the state workers whose rights are under threat, released a statement condemning the GOP plan.

And as other Democrats have pointed out, the GOP plan is the antithesis of what Wisconsin Republicans campaigned on in 2010. Instead of focusing on jobs, their plan could have catastrophic long-term consequences for the state economy:

State Representative Mark Pocan, a Madison Democrat, argues that: “Wisconsin is hardly ‘open for business’ if businesses can’t attract employees because of a bad employee climate in our state. The government banning employees from negotiating through unions is a radical and dangerous notion that Wisconsin simply shouldn’t embrace. If high-tech and emerging industries can’t attract employees because of our bad employee atmosphere in our state, they certainly won’t locate here.”

But as public outrage continues to swirl, Wisconsin Democratic legislators have one message for those who came to Madison to stand up for the basic rights of workers to negotiate their pay and working conditions: