 Hello, my name is Nenette Bolivash, and welcome back to Legislative Update. I am so glad to be back. I've been co-hosting this show with Jim Baumgart for a year. Now, he was our longest-running host. I understand Legislative Update is the longest-running show on WSCS. I'm very honored to take over this show from Jim Baumgart. We will have him back. It's been an interesting week in a month, rather, in Wisconsin politics. We are taping this show today, three days after Governor Walker signed a set of very controversial bills after an extraordinary session, also called a lame-duck session. People on my side of the aisle are very opposed to that. People on the other side of the aisle have very, most of them, have strong feelings for why they supported it. We have three guests today to talk about this. I'm very honored to have former State Senator, Kel Potter, who was also a co-host of this show a long time ago in an early incarnation. Today, he was representing Common Cause of Wisconsin. With him, we have Jay Heck, who is our Executive Director of Common Cause. I'm very delighted. He's all the way from Madison here. They are old friends. They appeared on their show together. He has very strong feelings about the special session as well, very strong arguments. And he's gonna talk about that. And then I'm delighted that Rebecca Clark, my partner in crime, we both ran for the State Assembly as Democrats for two times. She's an environmentalist, an activist, an educator, and she also attended the public hearing that I watched on Wisconsin Eye, but she was there in Madison. So thank you all for coming. We have some footage. I don't know if they've already played that or not, but I'd like to show that if we could. It was at the State Capitol in early December, very contentious hearing. That footage was provided by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and they also provided the pictures that we will be showing while we talked. They were there. They're one of the premier journalism organizations in the Midwest and in the country, actually. That's a whole topic of a different show for where journalism is headed. But today, we're talking about the special session. So let me start with Jay Heck. I don't know if you were there at the public hearing, but you were. Okay, well, tell me about it. They're saying shame. Well, you know, just to put this in context, last November 6th, Wisconsin voters sent a pretty clear signal about the direction they wanted the state to go. They elected into statewide constitutional offices, all Democrats throwing out Republican incumbents for governor and attorney general. And even though the Republicans still maintain a strong majority in both the state assembly and in the state Senate, more Wisconsin citizens voted for Democratic candidates for the legislature, some 55%. And yet the Republicans maintained 63% of the state legislative seats. That's because of the gerrymandering that occurred in 2011. That was one of Common Causes issue. It is, but this so-called lame duck session, first of all, it's very unusual. They rarely happen. An extraordinary session of the legislature rarely happens. There was one eight years ago. It was in very short agenda. It was to approve some contracts with public employees that had already been negotiated, but it was very limited. And the contracts, by the way, were not approved by the state Senate, but that's all they did. This lame duck session is unprecedented, not only in Wisconsin, but almost in the country, North Carolina did something similar two years ago when a Democratic governor was elected and the Republicans tried to strip away power from him. And this is the follow-up. This is the model that Wisconsin has now presented, which is extraordinary in only one sense. No one asked for it. No one supports it at the public hearing that she'll talk about. Not a single person testified in favor of this lame duck legislation. Not one. Not one single person. And there were over 1,100 people who either testified against it or registered for it. And only one entity in the entire state expressed support. That was the state's largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers in Commerce, which many have said is a wholly owned, which wholly owns the Republican legislature because of the funding. So it was a blow, I think, to the face of Wisconsinites. It was insulting. It was released late on a Friday afternoon. It was rammed through in one public hearing the following Monday, and by the next day, it was on the floor of both the state Senate and the assembly. And at 7 a.m. in the morning, in the dark of the night, it was passed. Democracy dies in darkness, and this is exactly what has happened. And I think the citizens of Wisconsin are gonna feel the repercussions of this for a long time. And they ought to be pretty upset about it. Well, get into that. I don't lose that thought. Rebecca, what did you take away from that session? Yeah. Well, I got there probably about 1130 into Madison. The meeting was supposed to start at noon, and there was already a lot of people. But it still had a, I mean, I know the videos might look a little chaotic, but it still had a very collegial feel to it. There was staff there where you could sign in to speak and put it down, and everyone was helping everybody get signed up to speak. We were told that there would be an initial portion of the meeting where legislators would talk, and then they would start public input, which they were gonna allow to go until nine o'clock at night. So then I went to, because where they had the meeting was in a very small room. And this was a joint committee on finance. Correct. Which I thought was probably a bit of a mistake knowing just how much people would be interested in these particular bills. They should have maybe had a larger room. So by the time I had signed in, you could no longer get into the actual meeting room. I went to the first overflow room. The staff at the Capitol were extremely accommodating. That was full. I went to the second overflow room. That was full. I snuck into the third overflow room where they had TV set up, and basically then you were watching it on Wisconsin Eye. But there was a lot of rumblings because the meeting did not start on time. The Republicans, Rob and Voss had a press conference, which people were kind of following on Twitter because we couldn't find it anywhere else. So there was a lot of waiting. And then we got to listen to, again, on this committee, there's only three Democrats. It was a very contentious meeting. Democrats were not allowed to make statements. They could only ask questions. 20 Republicans to four Democrats on that committee. It's 12 to four. 12 to four. Yeah, so I waited around probably to about five o'clock and because there was really no sign up, like you're next. Who's, you know, it was just kind of waited out. So then I was able to go close to the Capitol to a restaurant. I met up with Sarah Godlowski. Our current state treasurer. Soon to be treasurer. Our elected state treasurer, who I went through the Emerge training program with and we were able to sit down and kind of talk about her position. I'll be watching very closely to make sure that they aren't stripping any of her powers from this position that she worked very hard to save. And interestingly enough, as we were sitting there, Robin Voss and actually Devin Lemihue and some other people came into the restaurant. So we were able to ask them a few questions. I know Devin said very clearly, Senator Lemihue that he didn't think it would all pass. And as we heard later that night, I believe it was the early elections changing the election date for the primaries did not pass. So... Before I introduce Kel, I wanna preface that we did invite Devin Lemihue, our state senator, to join us on this program. And I like to think he might have come if he could have, but he cited Scheduling Conflicts. I hope he would, he has an open invitation. It would have been great to have a current state senator and a former state senator, Kel Potter. But you're here today in the capacity of Common Cause of Wisconsin. You're on the board, long-time board member. Yes. What is your deepest concern about what just transpired? Well, I think it's reflective of two things that have happened in society. One is that we got partisanship on steroids. I went through a transition from Marty Schreiber in 1978 who was governor, Democratic governor, to Lee Dreyfus who was a Republican. And I being in the legislature and the Democrats controlling the legislature wouldn't have dreamt of doing anything to impede anything that Lee Dreyfus was gonna do. We had the attitude, we'll work with this guy as best we can. I went through it again in 1986 when Tony Earl was defeated by Tommy Thompson. Again, a Democratic legislature and everybody knew exactly what Tommy Thompson was all about because he had served in the assembly for many years. Not a peep about making any type of transition to strip his powers in some way. So I think this hyperpartisanism is something that has taken over this society. It's shown on the federal level, it's shown on the state level. And it's unfortunate because I think it gives people an attitude that that's all that matters. The other part is the districts that are dreary-mandered that have made these people who have done this so safe that they literally don't give a damn. They will come out with an agenda that's never historically been done before in Wisconsin, pass it with a hearing that has no people speaking in favor, all in opposition, thousands of people expressing that opinion and just kind of looking at you and say, what's the problem? Who's opposed to this? And it's due to the fact that these districts are so safe and Jay has reflected the numbers when you look at the top tickets, it's all Democrats and the legislature, both for the legislature, the mass majority is Democrat, but yet they control overwhelmingly every seat in the legislature. And I think there was only one change in the whole legislature. That tells you something about what has happened to structurally and the idea of partisanship in our society and it's a dirty shame and people ought to be very concerned about it. And I'm concerned particularly by the lack of concern. People vote today on guns, they vote on abortion, they vote on gays, 80% of even general Christians vote Republican, I would say probably NRA members and 90% probably vote Republican. They don't care whether it's Donald Trump, the idiot or Scott Walker or whoever's carrying a banner and how bad their legislation or proposals are, they're gonna vote that way. And it's a shame because it doesn't bode well for the democracy. Well, I did receive a letter, many of us did, those of us who reached out to our lawmakers, please don't vote for this, we were doing it for days on our side and you might have gotten this letter from Devin, I mean as he explains it, the bills passed an extraordinary session enabled the legislature to do our job as part of a co-equal branch of government. And we know Governor Walker, when he signed this last Friday he said, I have his quote here, something about despite all the hype and hysteria out there, these bills do nothing to fundamentally diminish executive authority. The bottom line is the new governor will continue to be one of the most powerful chief executives in the country. How do you answer that? If I may. I knew you would. I don't think anything highlights the hypocrisy of both of those statements. Better than what happened the day before governor, Walker signed the legislation into law, the three bills and the day before when he unilaterally used executive power to grant the Kimberly-Clark corporation $28 million in tax incentives for them to stay in Wisconsin. Kimberly-Clark basically had Wisconsin over a barrel, pay us or we're leaving. And so what Walker did, he said he wanted this to be his legacy was I will unilaterally bypass the legislature and use my executive authority to grant those tax incentives. The next day he signed a bill which eliminated the power of the governor to be able to do that. I mean that is just such a vivid example of the hypocrisy of all of this. The other thing of course is that many of the powers that they've taken away from Evers were granted to Governor Walker and I think it's very safe to say that had Governor Walker been reelected that none of this would have happened, none of it. So to suggest that the co-equal branch of government is now being put into place, A, it didn't receive a mandate from the voters of Wisconsin, B, nobody knew what they were doing until they sprang this package upon Wisconsinites and C, it's going to I think make for an incredibly litigious next two years with so much of this is gonna be tied up in the courts. And I wanna get into that but first I wanna say what I have heard on talk shows, I think Joe Winicky, the former state party chair and John Sharpless were on public radio talking about this and people called in and said, oh you Democrats are the hypocrites because you did do this in 2010 with the lame deck session. And you mentioned this earlier. You're just, it wasn't as strong. We did pass. What about in New Jersey where there were Democrats who were trying to, as I understand it, make permanent gerrymandering? You wouldn't defend that I would hope. Well no, not at all. I mean, all you have to do is go south of the border to Illinois. They've had the same speaker of the Illinois General Assembly since 1982. That's absolutely wrong. I mean, nobody should be power corrupt when the longer you're in often it's more corrupting. So no, this is not a Democratic-Republican issue. This is much more a fundamental systemic issue that destroys democracy when the voices of citizens are robbed when you don't have a choice in a general election when it's already been predetermined. I also think, like you said, it was really brought up as we wanna have co-equal branches of government. I completely agree and I think there is no one out there who thinks that Robin Voss would have passed this if Governor Walker would have run. That is disingenuous, it would not have happened. So it's pretty blatant what they're doing. And I give Republicans a lot of credit for that. They're really not hiding what is essentially a power grab and they've laid it out very clearly how they're gonna do it. The other piece that I've heard from folks is that, well, Tony Evers made it very clear he was not gonna work with the legislators. So we wanted to preemptively make sure the Wisconsin Education Development Corporation. Well, yeah, and this was something that Terry Katz might actually put in his recent email that he sent out that we wanted to make sure that we kept in place all of these things that we've done to move Wisconsin forward. And I personally paid very close attention to this election. I didn't hear those kinds of words from Tony. I did hear about the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. Which is a disaster. I like the idea. I think the premise of having something like that, that can work with these bigger contracts, international contracts, makes a lot of sense. It is corrupt, it is broken, it hasn't worked, it hasn't had the correct oversight. That was one area. And then healthcare was the other big area that Tony and a bunch of these other ran on. And they took those powers away, which as you said, was not what the people voted for. And that's unfortunate. And let's go down this. Can we go down what actually happened for the people who weren't following the news? What was in these bills that concerns you? He removed the power from the Wisconsin, from the WEDC from the governor. Now it has to be approved by the legislature. Any changes in the board or any withdrawal of contracts has to be approved by the legislature. Early voting, now it can't be longer than two weeks, correct? You can still send in an absentee ballot before then. But you can't go into any state office. It used to be as much as six weeks. And talk about hypocrisy. Local governments, county governments had the right to determine when people could begin to early vote. The Republicans are always saying, let the locals decide. This is big brother with a hammer, saying only two weeks out. And the only reason is because they didn't like the early voting that was occurring in some of the more democratic counties in the state. My question always is, why do they fear the voters so much? They do fear the voters. They have voter suppression tactics. And this is just another one. By the way, this is, there's a good shot. This one will be struck down by a federal court. Again? Well, about the early voting. Right, yes. I think one Wisconsin now has already said they're going to. Right, and the National Redistricting Foundation were important one, right? And to put that in, I don't think it will affect people of Sheboygan or probably thinking, what's the big deal? People of Sheboygan County. But in areas even up north where you have a DMV that may only be open every third Wednesday or only on certain weekends, it makes it much harder to go in and get registered and to change your address to do all those other things that you wanna do as a responsible voter. So in areas like Sheboygan where it might be a little bit more accessible, you have to think about places like Milwaukee that has huge populations. And yes, I think that the clerk of courts appreciates the more people we can get in ahead of time, it does help with those lines on election days. But clearly they did not listen to that. So. It's also Medicaid funding. Governor Evers has to get permission to make any changes with that, I understand it. He cannot withdraw from the Affordable Care Act lawsuit. Without the legislature's approval. And what they've really done is gone after the most vulnerable in our population, those people who received Medicaid and they now are requiring, have a work requirement for anybody from the age of 18 to 50 who receives Medicaid and doesn't have children. Well, so you give Kimberly Clark generous tax rebates so that they will remain in Wisconsin and hold some jobs. That's nice, but let's go after the people who are most vulnerable in our society. Nobody voted for that. And among the long list of organizations that came out against this before it was passed and before the governor signed it were disability rights groups. And. The Wisconsin Medical Society. Even the doctors groups. Hospitals. Right, AARP, League of Women Voters. I have quotes from all of them on the wheeler report that I strongly recommend people look at. There were two Republicans who did vote against this. One state Senator, Robert Cowles. Coles of Green Bay. And then one state assemblyman, Todd Novak from Dodgeville. He said, it is my job to cast my vote in the interest of those whom I represent. And he heard from many, many people against. I would love to know what our local lawmakers, what the ratio of people for or against. I don't know. We'll find out. There's already an open records request that state senators and state representatives will have to turn over their communications. And we will know what the margin is. And if it's anything like the public hearing. The Chi attendee. Pretty one sided. Nobody was for any of this. Nobody. That's a tremendous financial loss for Wisconsin having not taken that money. I think it's over a billion dollars during the time of Walker's term. And basically his premise was that he wanted to be president and wanted to show how conservative they was. So he trashes the high speed rail that we would participate. Oh I know, I was still broken hearted about that. And he said, I'm not gonna take any federal dollars for the medical. Help for poor people. And as a result, it was based on a premise of his campaign and being ultra conservative. And that's what happens also with gerrymandered districts. The ultra conservative Republican wins the primary. And that drives the whole ship because everybody's afraid of a primary from an ultra conservative Republican who would win in a primary. And so when people just step back and look at the mechanisms that are in place and why people are making these decisions, it should outrage you really because it is not based on the merits of the issue. You know, I just wanna say when Cal was in the legislature and I worked with him many years ago, almost 30 years ago, there were a lot more. Who's counting? Well, you were barely old. We have a picture of him running for state assembly in the late 70s. But the point I was making is that there used to be what we call moderate Republicans. In fact, I grew up as one. Rockefeller Republicans is maybe the word that some people might know. They've all been driven out of the party because as Cal mentioned, it's the ultra conservatives because of the way that they're gerrymandered. And the way that works is that activists come out in the primaries and they vote in the primaries and those are the people who determine who the nominees are. I'm not gonna let the Democrats off the hook either because the moderate Democrats have been, many of them have been driven out. And so what you have are very polarized political parties and people that sit in the legislature. And it makes for a toxic environment in order to create, come together and make bipartisan consensus. A couple more points. So I'm, we, as we found out, we are surrounded by conservatives in Sheboygan County. I mean, so if you are talking, if I'm talking to a conservative friend who voted for Governor Walker and says, this doesn't look so bad. What would you tell him? Why should they be concerned about this as well? Well, one thing I would say and I kind of talked to you a little bit about this before we started the show is in talking to my conservative friends or even people at the door, I think a lot of it is just an education. They aren't really sure of how will this affect me in my day-to-day life. And as you know, we don't have alternate voices in this district. So all the information we get comes from our Republican counterparts and you really have to parse through that. If, for example, with this lawsuit that Wisconsin was a part of, we overturn the Affordable Care Act, it does not matter what bill is passed by a Republican legislature to protect pre-existing conditions because without the federal subsidies, it will become so expensive that insurance companies will leave the state. So they've kind of painted themselves into a little bit of a corner here, but on the good news, what I'm excited about is that we do now have platforms in the governor's office, in the state treasurer's office, and in the attorney general's office. Now, the power may have been limited, but I think the voice is still there. So now, once we get these people in there, let's get them inaugurated. They can look at this DOT budget, which I think has some issues. We can take a look at the Economic Development Corporation. Let's take a look at the Foxconn deal. And actually, can you parse that out for me what was actually agreed to? And instead of a lot of us in these democratic wildernesses, if you will, waiting for things like investigative reporting, now we do have some people there in the Capitol that can inform people, hey, this is how it's gonna affect you in your day-to-day life. This is how many tax dollars per year are gonna be going to Foxconn to Kimberly-Clark. And that to me is something that makes activism because I think we do agree on more than we disagree. So I'm excited about that. Are you guys optimistic as well? She wanted to switch. Don't laugh at me. That's, no, I don't mean to be... That's the thing I'm more negative than a lot of her friends, and it's true. But I do it on good premise. One is that I believe that experience is one. I have observed that people's knowledge tends to be very much in the area of sports, entertainment, and consumerism. You can ask them questions about sports or products or whatever, and they're very well-versed in their life. And what about just current girlfriend is? Sure, or how to work the iPhones and all these things. So they have, you just have limited capacity and time in life, and I think people have focused on things that are not civic in nature. And I like, I hate to embarrass people by saying they're civic illiterate, and how do you change that? It's not easy. I used to teach civics to freshmen, and you'd take a whole dang semester to try to pound it in your head some basic concepts. How do people in their busy lives, very technology, very entertainment oriented, and sports oriented, get their attention to say, don't just think about guns. Just don't think about abortion. Let's talk about Medicaid. Let's talk about Social Security. Let's talk about Medicare. It really affects you, yeah. The cost of your medicine. The infrastructure, the education, yes. A whole gamut of things that are really important in life, but it's tough to get their attention. And I do, I'm not being negative that we can't do this. I'm just saying it's damn hard to do it because you have to get their attention, and you have to say, here are some things you ought to look at besides Fox News. So we only have a minute left, Jay. Is there anything positive that you can look forward to despite this section that you disagree with? Well, they did reduce sharply, well, not sharply, well, significantly the governor's powers and the attorney general's powers, they still have enough power, I think, to be able to stop some of the excesses that the legislature may be tempted to try to push through. Certainly the redistricting issue in 2021, the governor will be able to veto any sort of partisan plan that was shoved through as it was in 2011. So that's a positive thing. The key, I think, really, though, is people need to focus not on the long-term damage this has done, but on the very next election, which is this April for the Supreme Court. It's critical, it's a critical election, and then there'll be another Supreme Court election the following April. So people have to stay involved and engaged. Okay, thank you so much. So they can find more information on your website, Common Cause Wisconsin, just do a search. Wonderful, wonderful wealth of information. Thank you so much for joining. The conversation will definitely continue. Thank you so much. This is Nanette Glovaesh for Legislative Update.