Photo by Richard Hurd Flickr CC
Last week, the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported that the first attack on the state’s open records law, which blew up over the July 4 weekend, wasn’t the Republicans’ only attempt to make the work of legislators less transparent. CMD found that despite his denials Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) continued his quest to shield legislators from the public’s prying eyes and conceal their secrets after the first plan backfired.
Originally, Republican leaders had been working on a plan to gut the state’s open records laws by exempting legislative records from open records requests. That means the public would never know which special interests were behind pieces of sweetheart legislation or which elected officials authored some truly terrible ideas.
Instead of Vos following the proper legislative procedures and bringing his original plan to gut the open records law to the state Legislature in the form of a bill that lawmakers would have to debate and vote on in public, Vos decided to jam it into a last-minute, catch-all amendment to the state budget that would be introduced late on July 2, when Republican lawmakers thought nobody would notice. There were no hearings, no way for the voters to voice their concern about an issue that would essentially protect corrupt legislators. Turns out that people did notice—and the media’s and public’s outrage forced lawmakers to scuttle the plan. But CMD discovered that Vos was still backing a sneak open records attack after the original one was torpedoed.
The media’s uproar over the Vos plan helped to defeat it and we’re heartened to see the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board actually take a strong stand on this important issue and the corrupt way the Legislature is currently functioning in Madison. It is refreshing to see our daily paper occasionally acting like the watchdog a newspaper is supposed to be.
Unfortunately, our daily paper rarely calls out the current Republican Legislature and current Milwaukee County executive. For example, the catch-all amendment that Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and state Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee, slipped into the budget before the Fourth of July weekend was packed with other corrupt proposals, such as the “Abele amendment,” which would have given Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele near-autonomous power over county government, including a sort of supreme veto over county supervisors. That imperial plan was scaled back in the final version of the budget to “merely” give Abele near-autonomous power over non-park land sales in the county. Now, the “Abele amendment” allows the county executive, who appears to have a solid pattern of taking care of his friends at the expense of the county taxpayers, the right to literally sell off county assets such as our airport to whomever he chooses with virtually no checks or controls by our elected county supervisors. The Journal Sentinel editors provided very weak criticism of this new policy, only saying that some of Abele’s new powers might be “reasonable measures” but that the proposal should have been introduced as a stand-alone bill. Think about it. The Abele amendment would have been just as—if not more—disastrous for transparent, clean, open government as Vos’ open records plan.
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We welcome the Journal Sentinel’s outrage over the Republican efforts to gut the open records law, and hope that it continues to act like an honest newspaper and be the watchdog that it is supposed to be. We just wish it weren’t so selective and self-serving.
