For those of you who did not take time out from your July 4 holiday weekend to read budget documents (and yes, I AM that much of a nerd, thank you) I wanted to point out that the much-ballyhooed issue with the Leg devastating open records in the state was only part of the last minute Motion 999 surprise. Over the next week or so I'll be bringing up some of the other actions that the Legislature has been taking to make life in Wisconsin less sustainable. But there's way too much to fit in one article, so I'll be dragging this out.
First off, let's mention that the crazed recanting of the transparency provisions in the motion is a sham. Despite Walker and the other responsible parties saying "nope, didn't mean what you thought, we're all for transparency, nothing to see here", any reasonable reading of the motion makes it clear that what was intended was to gut the transparency laws for the legislature. Either the English language is a mystery to the authors of this bill, or what we're really seeing here is another example of the Walker camp trying to slip something in, getting caught, and then trying to explain it away by telling us all that we cannot read. I will accept the fact that this is a group of people who have a limited grasp of our language, but still, it's pretty clear it's a matter of getting their hand caught in the cookie jar and acting like a 3-year-old. "Cookies? Jar? Not me mommy. I was putting cookies IN".
Speaking of mystery - this is yet another one of those pieces of legislation written by "nobody". "Nobody" really should be getting more votes, as this prolific writer of laws has been particularly active as of late. Laws appear on the books, and nobody will admit to having proposed them, written them, or even having seen them before they went into effect. I've begun to think of this as the parthenogenesis model of legislating - laws just somehow appear out of nothing. This probably explains the frenzied attempt on their parts to cover their tracks in the future by making all drafting documents a secret. Everyone says that law-making is like sausage-making and you're better off not seeing it happening, but it's pathetic that the current folks in our capitol think that we should be prevented from trying to catch a peek.
But as our friend Capper often says, there's always more, which is really the point I am getting at. There are many other gems in the document, many of which were pointed out today by BlueCheddar. Let's just talk about one of them.
Many many years ago in the Fitzwalkerstan story Act 10, another pathenogenesis law, took effect. One of the "reforms" foisted off on an unsuspecting state was a transparent union-busting piece of legislation that required state employees (well, at least the "bad" state employees like teachers) to re-certify their union every year, and to re-certify by a vote of over 50% of the membership of the union, rather than 50% of those who voted. While in some sense I can appreciate the idea that this makes voting more important, I note that nobody was crying out to only let someone be governor if over 50% of the registered voters approved. It's a nearly-impossible bar for a union to reach.
But apparently that was not enough, because the last-minute Motion 999 set the bar for creating a union to be the same as keeping it - over 50% of the possible union members will now have to vote for the union in order to start it. Don't expect to be seeing any new unions of state employees in the near future. Or ever.
I'm beginning to think that someone had the paper upside down and this was really intended to be Motion 666. It may not be marked by the devil, but it reeks of fire and brimstone. Or perhaps that's just the smell of corruption.