Fixing the fix

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
January 18, 2010

By Bill Kraus

All the talk about the 2010 elections is about the referendum on the Obama/Democrats response to the great recession, about the length of the coattail on the Obama popularity if any (coattail or popularity), and how these things will play out in legislative elections everywhere.

No one is talking about the fact that the legislatures elected in 2010 will be responsible for the mandated legislative redistricting that will follow the 2010 census.

Don’t kid yourself. There is a great deal of talk about this. But it is among the insiders who nest in the D.C. beltway and the Madison capitol square.

The alleged purpose of redistricting is to even out the size of the Assembly, Senate and House districts, and achieve some kind of popular homogeneity within them while getting as many competitive races as possible.

What the legislative leaders are trying to get is redistricting that protects the electoral majorities of the current incumbents (who will, not so incidentally, get to vote on whatever districting plan is proposed) and to save campaign expenses by reducing the number of districts that have competitive races for which they will have to raise the money to run.

I was unhappily in the middle of the redistricting process that followed the 1980 census. There were some very important issues on the public agenda at that time because a post-Carter recession was closing in on those in power. My recollection is that the actual agenda revolved around a state senator whose father-in-law would no longer live in his district if a particular plan was enacted, and an assembly representative whose finance chair was being moved to another district, and more turf battles in more places. The recession could wait.

Since then, Wisconsin’s elections have been Kohl-ized, and large amounts of money are thought to be necessary to win seats in areas that are really up for grabs.

The legislative leaders’ top objective now is to keep the campaign costs manageable by reducing the number of those elections.

If there was an anti-trust law that applied to the conspiracies hatched by the likes of Dave Obey and Jim Sensenbrenner for the congressional districts, and for their counterparts in Madison who carve up the state into legislative districts, all of them would have violated it.

There wasn’t. There still isn’t. Until and unless there is we will have a situation where the candidates are picking their constituents rather than vice versa.

The post-2000 redistricting has resulted in about a third of the state legislative elections being settled in July when nomination papers are filed and one out of three candidates drawing no opponent. Another third are settled in September primaries where the winning candidate for one party or the other will be virtually guaranteed a victory in a partisan-loaded area in November. That leaves about a third where both parties think they have a shot at a November victory while in reality only about a third of that third do.

My question is why aren’t all those tea party protesters who are painting signs, holding rallies, and marching in the streets to express their unhappiness with the people who represent them focusing on this? Screaming slogans and insults will do nothing to dismantle the districting system that denies them a chance to elect someone who might be more responsive to their grievances.

Until and unless there is a revolutionary change in how we carve up the legislative districts, the status quo is pretty much safe from any party, including any tea party.


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Keeping our appointments

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
January 11, 2010

By Bill Kraus


The road to appointing instead of electing judges and justices in Wisconsin is long, twisting, and full of potholes large enough to swallow a truck.

The constitutional barrier is high and prolonged. The cultural barrier dwarfs the constitutional barrier.

Wisconsin is election addicted.

We elect coroners, city clerks, registers of deeds.

We elect constitutional officers to jobs that no longer exist.

We thwart attempts to make education a cabinet office because we prefer to elect a superintendent of public instruction who mainly supervises a money-shuffling bureaucracy.

The chances of giving up the right to elect judges and justices are somewhere between zero and none.

The argument that well over half of the people on benches in Wisconsin got there by appointment not election is beyond unpersuasive. It’s unheard.

But it does suggest an opportunity to get much of what the advocates of an appointment process promise without banging their heads against a double brick wall.

Every appointment system starts with some sort of selection process which is designed to put the smartest, fairest, most qualified prospects into a pool from which the governor must pick an appointee.

The Legislature could enact such a process statutorily. No constitutional amendment required.

This kind of pre-selection gets the search off the governor’s desk, gives the Legislature and the people and the advocates of appointment over election assurance that the ultimate appointees will be qualified for these important jobs and will not be partisan cronies or worse. The majority of the first time occupants of judicial posts will come out of these pools instead of a ballot box.

Easy. Effortless. Uncontroversial.

Not quite. One pothole remains: Who will be on the panel that selects the pool of candidates for the governor to appoint from and the state Senate to confirm?

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Wish list: 2010

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
January 7, 2010

By Bill Kraus


1. A reduction in the need for money in political campaigns specifically, politics generally.

2. A reinvention, resuscitation, or something, of journalism.

3. A return of citizen politicians to the business of campaign management.

4. A decline in the influence of talk radio and other manifestations of faux journalism.

5. A revival of political ambition and a concomitant decrease in careerism by office holders.

6. A redistricting of legislative districts which is designed to have more rather than fewer congressional and state legislative districts which are competitive.

7. A reduction in the number, influence, and virulence of groups with narrow interests in politics.

8. An invention of a general interest political device into which special interests could be incorporated and citizens could find a route into political activism other than through special interest groups or entrepreneurial candidate organizations.

9. A re-creation of politics as a participatory instead of a spectator sport.

10. An end to endless (or continuous) campaigns and campaigning (see wish number 1, above).

11. A return to discourse and adversity in political discourse; sometimes referred to as civility, mutual respect or listening.

We all know that our political institutions, like all institutions, are not much interested in self-correction. The only way, then, to even make progress in any of these 11 areas is for a lot of us to realize and react to our own culpability. Someone has said what we need is for more of us to recognize that the they we criticize is us. Or, to put it more directly, as the drunken driver who turned herself in to 9-1-1 did last year, “I am them.”


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