Deroy Murdock‘s latest column at National Review Online explains why he believes Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential prospects get a boost from his efforts to secure a state right-to-work law.

Walker’s signature will extend to private-sector employees the same protections that he and Wisconsin’s legislature provided government workers through Act 10 in 2011: Union membership will be a choice rather than a condition of employment. Dues will be paid voluntarily, not vacuumed automatically from workers’ wages, even before they see their paychecks.

This news will put Walker in the national limelight as this week dawns. Heading toward 2016, this new RTW law will help Walker burnish his conservative credentials even further. He already can point to a long list of successes beyond wholesale labor reforms. Among them: cutting $2 billion in state taxes, converting a $3.6 billion deficit into a $517 million surplus, expanding school choice, requiring voter ID cards, and terminating taxpayer subsidies for Planned Parenthood.

Walker accomplished these things not in a Republican stronghold like Arkansas or Texas, but in a state that last went Republican for president in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was on the ballot. The Badger State is the birthplace of government-worker unions and the late U.S. senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette, father of what liberals now call Progressivism. As Mike Flynn observed February 28 on Breitbart.com: “Politically, Walker isn’t bringing coals to Newcastle.”

A Wisconsin RTW law would be like Democrats implementing a 25 percent state income-tax rate in Alabama. The odds are that no other Republican presidential aspirant will accomplish anything so significant anytime soon.