Last week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker put a deceptively positive gloss on the legal battles surrounding his stalled union-busting bill in an interview with the right-wing Newsmax website.
Background on the Legal Battles
As CMD has reported, Governor Walker’s union-busting bill (“Act 10”) was amended by a conference committee on March 11 to avoid quorum requirements, then passed by the Wisconsin Senate with no Democrats present. State Open Meetings laws require 24 hours notice for all meetings, or two hours with “good cause,” but neither standard was met at the March 11 vote. Following a complaint from Dane County’s District Attorney, Judge MaryAnn Sumi found a probable Open Meetings violation and issued an order preventing the Secretary of State from publishing the bill, a necessary step before it can become law. Attorney General JB Van Hollen appealed the decision, and the Court of Appeals offered the case to the state Supreme Court on March 24, which has not taken action (possibly because Justice Prosser’s election is still pending). In the meantime, the Legislative Reference Bureau published the law under statutory authority separate from that of the Secretary of State, raising questions of whether the bill has become law, and prompting Judge Sumi to issue an order declaring it not to be in effect.
On April 7, Governor Walker’s Administration jumped into the fray and asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to vacate Judge Sumi’s order.
Walker Administration’s Legal Position Contrary to Governor’s Statements
The Walker Administration’s petition was discussed during the Governor’s videotaped interview with mustachioed Newsmax anchor Ashley Martell. Walker said:
My administration this week appealed to the state Supreme Court on two counts. Really both on […] the fact that we don’t believe it is legitimate for the judge to be an issuing a temporary restraining order when we think the law was dufully (sic) passed by the members of the state legislature. (at 3:29)
Mustache Martella replied: “speaking of that, the legal issue seems to be the notice given before the vote . . .”
The heart of the issue that is regarding the restraining order really involves the issue of the open meetings laws and whether or not there was notice on that. The legislature feels, and I think they are right about this, that they very clearly did follow the statute, that under other circumstances there might be a problem, but in a special session . . . it is clear that they followed the law. (at 4:12)
Despite Walker’s faith in the conduct of fellow Wisconsin Republicans, his legal team is not contending that GOP legislators followed the law, but only that violations of that law be enforced more leniently. In its petition to the Supreme Court, not once does Walker’s Administration argue that Republican legislators acted lawfully.
Walker’s petition focuses on three issues, claiming (1) that breaking an Open Meetings law is a “procedural violation” that cannot be punished through voiding a legislative act, (2) that a court does not have jurisdiction to prevent a bill from becoming law (even if it may have authority to void a law once enacted), and (3) that the Act is published and is now law, meaning Sumi’s order has no relevance. The brief also questions whether the District Attorney can sue to invalidate a statute, and whether Judge Sumi could enter an order considering defendants’ legislative immunity. Significantly, the petition does not discuss whether legislative notice rules can override Open Meetings laws (which, if argued, could have implied legislators acted lawfully).
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Walker’s Newsmax statements give the impression that legislators acted honorably, avoiding the fact that they may have illegally shut citizens out of the political process, violated the state’s constitutionally-recognized open government guarantees, and did so on a bill that has a significant impact and massive public attention. This is no small matter. As the late Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice William Bablitch wrote in the 1994 case State ex rel. Hodge vs. Town of Turtle Lake:
The purpose of the Open Meetings Law is to protect the public’s right to be informed to the fullest extent of the affairs of government. . . An open meetings law is not necessary to ensure openness in easy and noncontroversial matters where no one really cares whether the meeting is open or not. Like the First Amendment, which exists to protect unfavored speech, the Open Meetings Law exists to ensure open government in controversial matters.
Open Meetings laws are fundamentally important to Wisconsin’s democracy, and violations are serious business. If Walker genuinely believes the GOP lawmakers’ actions were virtuous and lawful, his administration’s legal documents should reflect that.
By: Brenda Fisher, Center for Media and Democracy, April 13, 2011
April 14, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Ideology, Politics, Public Employees, Right Wing, State Legislatures, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | Act 10, AG J B Van Hollen, Judge MaryAnn Sumi, Newsmax, Open Meetings Law, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, Wisconsin Democrats, Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin Senate, Wisconsin Supreme Court |
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Ohio Democrats this week introduced into a divided state legislature a new bill that would allow Ohio citizens to recall Governor John Kasich and other legislatures. The state has been in an ideological upheaval for months after Kasich’s budget bill was introduced, similar to the Wisconsin bill that has received incredible national attention for stripping unions of their collective bargaining rights, and eventually signed April 2nd after some concessions were made by the Republican-held Assembly and Senate.
There are now 17 other states where similar bills have been passed. Democrats in Ohio are now trying to join the ranks of some of those states like Wisconsin, where voters also have the option to recall their elected legislatures.
Reuters reported that State Representatives Mike Foley and Robert Hagan’s bill would allow “Ohio voters to undertake a recall effort if they gather petition signatures of voters equal to 15 percent of the total votes for governor or in a particular legislative district in the last election.”
Recall efforts are already well underway in Wisconsin, where 16 senators have petitions started against them. Governor Scott Walker, in his inaugural term, cannot be recalled until he has served in office for one full year, according to Wisconsin state law.
Kasich’s bill to limit collective bargaining rights of unions and slash funding for many state-funded programs has received passionate opposition by supporters of workers’ rights. Protests in Columbus drew thousands in February, riding the wave of protests started in Madison and that then spread throughout the country.
The hotly-contested Senate Bill 5, or SB5 as it has been dubbed by the media, severely limits the actions of unions, and in conjunction with Kasich’s budget, introduces major cuts to public programs: like a $852 million cut to schools.
The Toledo Blade explains SB5: “It prohibits all public employees from striking, prohibits local governments from picking up any portion of an employee’s contributions to his pension, eliminates automatic step and longevity raises in favor of a yet undefined performance-pay system, and prohibits unions from automatically collecting ‘fair share’ fees from members of a workforce who opt not to join the union.”
Besides the Democrats’ efforts to pass the recall bill, Ohio law also allows for a public referendum of any passed bill. Opponents of the bill need to gather 231,147 signatures 90 days from the official signing of the bill for the statewide referendum to be voted on Nov. 8th.
By: Jennifer Page, Center for Media and Democracy, April 11, 2011
April 13, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Elections, GOP, Gov John Kasich, Gov Scott Walker, Government, Governors, Ideologues, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Voters | Ohio, Ohio Senate Bill 5, Public Employees, Public Referendums, Recalls, State Budgets, Toledo Blade, Wisconsin, Workers Rights |
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If the federal government shuts down at midnight on Friday — which seems likely unless negotiations take a sudden turn toward rationality — it will not be because of disagreements over spending. It will be because Republicans are refusing to budge on these ideological demands:
• No federal financing for Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions. Instead, state administration of federal family planning funds, which means that Republican governors and legislatures will not spend them.
• No local financing for abortion services in the District of Columbia.
• No foreign aid to countries that might use the money for abortion or family planning. And no aid to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports family-planning services.
• No regulation of greenhouse gases by the Environmental Protection Agency.
• No funds for health care reform or the new consumer protection bureau established in the wake of the financial collapse.
Abortion. Environmental protection. Health care. Nothing to do with jobs or the economy; instead, all the hoary greatest hits of the Republican Party, only this time it has the power to wreak national havoc: furloughing 800,000 federal workers, suspending paychecks for soldiers and punishing millions of Americans who will have to wait for tax refunds, Social Security applications, small-business loans, and even most city services in Washington. The damage to a brittle economy will be substantial.
Democrats have already gone much too far in giving in to the House demands for spending cuts. The $33 billion that they have agreed to cut will pull an enormous amount of money from the economy at exactly the wrong time, and will damage dozens of vital programs.
But it turns out that all those excessive cuts they volunteered were worth far less to the Republicans than the policy riders that are the real holdup to a deal. After President Obama appeared on television late Wednesday night to urge the two sides to keep talking, negotiators say, the issue of the spending cuts barely even came up. All the talk was about the abortion demands and the other issues.
Democrats in the White House and the Senate say they will not give in to this policy extortion, and we hope they do not weaken. These issues have no place in a stopgap spending bill a few minutes from midnight.
A measure to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions came up for a Senate vote on Wednesday and failed. If Republicans want to have yet another legislative debate about abortion and family planning, let them try to pass a separate bill containing their restrictions. But that bill would fail, too, and they know it, so they have chosen extortion.
The lack of seriousness in the House is reflected in the taunting bill it passed on Thursday to keep the government open for another week at an absurdly high cost of $12 billion in cuts and the ban on District of Columbia abortion financing. The Senate and the White House said it was a nonstarter. Many of the same House members who earlier had said they would refuse to approve another short-term spending bill voted for this one, clearly hoping they could use its inevitable failure in the Senate to blame the Democrats for the shutdown. What could be more cynical?
The public is not going to be fooled once it sees what the Republicans, pushed by Tea Party members, were really holding out for. There are a few hours left to stop this dangerous game, and for the Republicans to start doing their job, which, if they’ve forgotten, is to serve the American people.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, April 8, 2011
April 8, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Abortion, Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Democrats, Economy, Federal Budget, GOP, Government Shut Down, Governors, Health Reform, Ideology, Lawmakers, Planned Parenthood, Politics, Public, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, Senate, State Legislatures, Tea Party, Voters, Women's Health, Womens Rights | EPA, Foreign Aid, Greenhouse Gases, Health Care Reform, House Republicans, Jobs, Military Pay, Spending |
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Although I’m not part of the Tea Party movement and I don’t share its values, I usually understand what its followers are trying to do. But their latest gambit on health care has me genuinely baffled.
The idea is to oppose the Affordable Care Act not in the Congress or the courts, where they’ve been fighting so far, but in the state legislatures. As you may recall, the Act calls upon states to create the new “exchanges,” through which individuals and small businesses will be able to buy regulated insurance policies at affordable prices. The simplest way to do that is for state legislatures to pass laws creating exchanges that conform to the Act’s standards. Several states have started that process already–and a few, like California, are well along in their efforts.
But Tea Party activists have been lobbying state lawmakers to vote against such measures and, in a few states, it looks like they’re succeeding. Politico’s Sarah Kliff has the story:
In South Carolina, tea party activists have been picking off Republican co-sponsors of a health exchange bill, getting even the committee chairman who would oversee the bill to turn against it.
A Montana legislator who ran on a tea party platform has successfully blocked multiple health exchange bills, persuading his colleagues to instead move forward with legislation that would specifically bar the state from setting up a marketplace.
And in Georgia, tea party protests forced Gov. Nathan Deal to shelve exchange legislation that the Legislature had worked on for months.
It’s a great idea for blocking the law, except for one small problem: The Affordable Care Act anticipates that some states might not create adequate exchanges. And the law is quite clear about what happens in those cases. The federal government takes over, creating and then, as necessary, managing the exchanges itself. In other words, if state lawmakers in Columbia, Helena, and Atlanta don’t build the exchanges, bureaucrats in Washington are going to do it for them.
I realize that blocking the exchange votes may have certain symbolic value–and, at least in the early going, it could complicate implementation simply by generating more chaos. (Georgia lawmakers, as the article suggests, had already put in a lot of time on theirs.) I also gather that some Tea Party activists believe that blocking state exchanges will strengthen the constitutional case against the law. Still, if even part of the law withstands both congressional repeal and court challenges, as seems likely, the long-term effect of this Tea Party effort seems pretty clear: It will mean even more, not less, federal control.
The irony here is that, throughout the health care debate, liberals like me wanted federal exchanges, in part because we feared states with reluctant or hostile elected officials would do a lousy job. That’s the way exchanges were set up in the House health care reform bill and, in January of 2010, many of us hoped the House version would prevail when the two chambers negotiated the final language in conference committee. But the conference negotiation never took place, because Scott Brown’s election eliminated the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. The House ended up passing the more conservative Senate bill, which had state exchanges, and that became the law.
Of course, not all Republicans agree with the Tea Party’s approach. In a previous article, for Politico Pro, Kliff interviewed several state officials who said they were setting up exchanges, notwithstanding their opposition to the law, precisely because it is the surest way to keep out the feds.
Len Nichols, the health care policy expert at George Mason University, thinks that approach makes a lot more sense, given their priorities:
Ironically, the only way to make PPACA a “federal takeover” is for states to do nothing. There is much state flexibility in the law, and much more could be sensibly negotiated and amended before 2014, but the strategy of repeal, do nothing and “get the government out of health care” will have exactly the opposite effect in those states that follow this path.
Maybe the Tea Party activists know something that neither Nichols nor I do. My bet, though, is that this effort is the policy equivalent of a temper tantrum, one that opponents of federalizing health care may come to regret.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 31, 2011
April 1, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Constitution, GOP, Health Care, Health Reform, Insurance Companies, Neo-Cons, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Teaparty | Federal Government, Federal Takeover, Gov Nathan Deal, Health Exchanges, Health Insurance, Montana, PPACA, Sarah Kliff, Sen Scott Brown, South Carolina, State Flexibility |
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The battle for the Midwest is transforming American politics. Issues of class inequality and union influence, long dormant, have come back to life. And a part of the country that was integral to the Republican surge of 2010 is shifting away from the GOP just a few months later.
Republican governors, particularly in Wisconsin and Ohio, denied themselves political honeymoons by launching frontal assaults on public employee unions and proposing budgets that include deep cuts in popular programs.
Democrats in the region are elated at the quick turn in their fortunes. A few months ago, they worried that a region President Obama dominated in 2008 was turning against him. Republican triumphs in Wisconsin and Ohio, as well as in Indiana, Michigan and Iowa, all pointed to trouble for the president.
Now, for reasons having more to do with decisions by GOP governors than with anything the president has done, many voters, particularly in the white working class, are having second thoughts.
“We certainly addressed the issue of Reagan Democrats,” said Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, referring to the blue-collar voters who began drifting Republican in 1980. Barrett lost to Gov. Scott Walker in November by 52 percent to 46 percent, but recent polls suggest he would defeat Walker if the election were rerun. In Ohio, the approval rating of Republican Gov. John Kasich, who won narrowly in 2010, has fallen to as low as 30 percent in one poll.
In telephone interviews last week, Democratic politicians across the Midwest avoided premature victory claims. “I don’t think we’ll know until November of 2012,” Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota replied when asked if the Republican moves against public employee unions would turn out to be a major error.
It’s a political irony that Republicans clearly believed unionized public employees were so unpopular that taking them on would play well with voters.
“It was part of an intentional strategy on the part of the right-wing Republican ideological machine to split private-sector workers from public-sector workers,” said Dayton, a Democrat who beat back the 2010 Republican tide. After decades involving “a giant transfer of wealth to the very top,” Dayton said, the campaign against public unions was “a way to distract attention” by creating “a fight over who is getting a dollar an hour more or less.” The effort, he added, “has not worked as well as they thought it would.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, said that even union sympathizers were surprised at the degree to which the Republicans’ approach “blew up in their faces” and that “the poll numbers of support for collective bargaining for public-sector workers are stronger than even most labor supporters expected.”
Another surprise: the extent to which Democrats, long wary of being accused of “class warfare,” are now more eager than ever to cast the GOP as the party of the privileged.
Barrett recounted a parable making the rounds among Wisconsin Democrats, telling of a room in which “a zillionaire, a Tea Party person and a union member” confront a plate of 12 cookies: “The zillionaire takes 11 of the cookies, and says to the other two, ‘That guy is trying to steal your cookie.’ ”
Still, Democrats are aware that the flight from the Republicans is also a reaction against ideology. Dayton saw the GOP’s heavy-handed methods in Wisconsin as playing badly in a region proud of its tradition of consensus-building and good government.
And Brown said that while joblessness was the most important issue in last year’s election, one of the most effective Republican arguments was the claim that “Obama was governing by ideology.” That charge has been turned on its head because “now, they are so overdoing governing by ideology.”
Sen. Al Franken said he saw this reaction against ideology playing out in Washington’s budget battle as well, citing the example of leading Minnesota business people, including Republicans, who have been appalled at cuts in effective job-training programs.
The first electoral tests of the new class politics will come in Wisconsin. David Prosser, a conservative state Supreme Court justice, is facing a surprisingly tough challenge April 5 from JoAnne Kloppenburg, who has strong backing from anti-Walker forces. Later this year, several Republican state senators could face recall elections.
The tests for the longer run will be whether echoes from the heartland’s struggles over economic justice are heard as Congress debates budget cuts — and the extent to which Obama, who has already benefited from fights he did not pick, decides to join the battle.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 27, 2011
March 28, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Jobs, Middle Class, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Unions, Wisconsin | Blue Collar, David Prosser, Gov John Kasich, Heartland, Ohio, Public Employees, Sen Al Franken, Sen Sherrod Brown, Working Class |
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