Wisconsin has not escaped the curse of partisanship in politics. The budget introduced nearly a year ago took months to go through the Legislature. First the Senate, then the Assembly, then the Joint Committees, then back to the governor.
Numerous changes were made, but mostly according to party. The Democrats want one thing and the Republicans another. Abandoning partisanship for legislators would be like ostracizing oneself — or so it seems in the state legislature.
Campaign-finance reform legislation has become very partisan. Currently, like the budget-reform bill, there are several versions of the legislation. Both the Senate and the Assembly passed campaign-finance legislation Feb. 26; however, they passed different versions of the bill, and they both refused to take up each other’s proposal.
Now here is where the bickering begins. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala, D-Madison, claims it is the fault of Assembly Republicans and the Senate is just waiting for the Assembly to act. Speaker Scott Jensen, R-Waukesha, said the Assembly can’t take up the Senate’s bill so it is the Democrats fault.
Campaign finance is stopped for now because of the bickering, but the budget-reform act is just now entering the ring. There are two drafts of the budget circulating.
The original was written by Gov. Scott McCallum, the second by the Joint Finance Committee. There will be three more drafts and a lot of red tape before the whole process is done. The Senate and Assembly will each write one and then a final compromise proposal will be attempted.
The proposals from the Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled Assembly will likely be radically different. Finally, the proposal goes back to the governor, where partisanship can come into play one more time with his veto pen.
Ultimately, five drafts of one document will be made, each taking weeks because legislators do not play nice and the bureaucracy holds it up, which occurs all the time.
The Joint Finance Committee saved some agencies from devastating cuts but doled out more cuts to the UW System. The UW System was already facing cuts of $51 million but after the action of the committee that number rose to $108 million. The deficit is $1.1 billion, so that would mean the UW System would have to be one-tenth of the state budget for the cuts to be equally applied to all state organizations. UW does not make up 10 percent of the entire state budget.
Despite a harmful decision for the UW System, the Joint Finance Committee at least came to a vote, but even the terms of the vote were debated. Democrats claim Assembly Republicans were hasty in calling a vote in order to intentionally leave Democrats in the dark about the contents of the bill. In fact, Sen. Gwendolynne Moore, D- Milwaukee, stormed from the room to express her disgust.
The partisan wrangling will continue on this issue. Advocates of the university scream of economic benefits while those supporting the cuts say it is necessary. McCallum will continue to proclaim, “Live within your means,” and it is possible nothing will get done or it will take a lot longer, unless everyone can just get along.
