WOULD MITT ROMNEY HAVE BEEN THE BIGGEST BAIT-AND-SWITCHER?

Jamelle Bouie detects a pattern:

One striking thing about Governor Rick Snyder's successful push for a right-to-work law in Michigan -- and Scott Walker's similar push against public employee unions in Wisconsin -- is that they relied on bait-and-switch tactics. In their campaigns, neither governor announced their support for right-to-work laws, or more broadly, their opposition to labor unions. They both campaigned as moderate Republicans, interested in a straightforward agenda of job creation and deficit reduction....

Not only did Snyder not support right-to-work laws during his gubernatorial bid, but he didn't campaign as an opponent of labor, making this reversal a huge surprise for Michiganders writ large.

Given Scott Walker's similar actions in Wisconsin, it seems that this is becoming a favored approach for Republican politicians....

Mitt Romney was actually a bit to the right of these guys during the 2012 campaign -- he said he'd sign a national right-to-work law if one just so happened to land on his desk, but he also said a state-by-state approach to the issue was best. Still, it was something he rarely if ever talked about voluntarily, and his campaign danced around the issue when asked about it late in the campaign.

So I wonder if he would have pulled a Walker/Snyder fast one if he'd had the chance. I'm not sure what it would have taken for this to happen -- Romney wins, the Senate goes GOP, McConnell abolishes the filibuster? -- but for a while all that seemed as if it could happen, and if not, the GOP might have consolidated full control after the 2014 midterms. If it did, I suspect there would have been precisely this sort of far-right blitzkrieg law-making, in some other fraught area if not in this one.

Concealing an extremist pro-fat-cat agenda during a campaign and then ramming legislation down the people's throats in a mad rush really does seem to be a favorite approach of duplicitous Republicans -- and we almost elected one of the most duplicitous Republicans of all. So just try to imagine what could have happened.