Our upended state

By Bill Kraus

A Supreme Court justice who was one of the court’s unanimous signers of a letter to the Legislature urging the passage of full public funding for elections to the court says he didn’t mean it and that the law was intended to cripple his election prospects. He said this even though he sailed through the pre-protest primary where the law got its first, unfettered test.

Another candidate for the Supreme Court takes a pass on a golden opportunity to trash the trashers who are demonizing everybody with their attack ads paid for with their anonymous money and who are undermining the Impartial Justice bill which has made her candidacy painless at least and maybe even possible.

A perfectly respectable, church-going, good neighbor family in rural Dane County with no evident dog in the current fight going on at the Capitol is accused of being responsible for telling 16 elected officials to put their affairs in order because they and their families will be killed.

One pole or another

By Bill Kraus

A recent poll by UW prof Ken Goldstein indicates polarization has reached new heights (or lows) and that the admonition in the rules of government--a stalemate must be broken before there is time to dig a trench--has been cast aside.

The Republicans are dug in on their issues and the Democrats on theirs. The only thing they agree on is that Senator Dale Schultz, who is wandering around in the no man’s land between them, is wrong because he got out of his trench in search of compromise.

The road to total polarization was started when the brilliant and bellicose Chuck Chvala (Democratic Senate Majority Leader) and Scott Jensen (Republican Speaker of the Assembly) convinced their caucuses not only that the ideas coming from the other side of the aisle were lousy but so were the people on the other side of the aisle who were espousing them.

The road from being adversaries to being enemies on a personal basis started then and has exacerbated ever since.

Picking battles

By Bill Kraus

Now that the 1959 battle over public employee unions is mostly over, the trenches are being dug for the next, bigger fight which will include a rerun of the merger wars of 1941.

What we are in for is a war with more fronts than the island hopping of the early 1940s--a little policy and lots of money at stake.

The big battles will revolve around the five major parts of the state budget which eat up 80 percent of the money. At the state level this budget is about dispensing money to others; it’s benefit driven. One step down where the benefits are disbursed the spending is labor driven.

The big five are (1) aid to K-12 education, most for teachers’ salaries (2) shared revenues to local governments, a lot of which goes for fire fighters and police officers (3) University of Wisconsin, money for professors, tuition aids, and lots of other good stuff (4) prisons, and (5) medicaid, where the number of supplicants has gone from 200,000 to 800,000, the frugality destroyer.