 and welcome back to the Donahue Group. We're delighted that you could join us for another half hour of good conversation and interesting ideas and maybe a little fun along the way. We have a special guest with us today, Jay Heck from Common Cause in Wisconsin. But before we introduce Jay, I want to go around and introduce our other panel members. I know we're becoming beloved to all of you, but just in case you don't remember, Ken Risto is the Director of Social Studies for the Sheboygan Area School District. Tom Taneski is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan campus. Cal Potter, former state senator, former employee with the Department of Public Instruction. That always takes me a long time to say in any event. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue. I practice law here in Sheboygan. Cal, I would be delighted if you would introduce Jay. I know that you're old friends. Okay, Jay Heck is with us. Jay is the Executive Director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, the 4,000-member public interest group, also affiliated with Common Cause on a national level. And Jay will give us a little background on what his organization is and its history after I get done with the bio that I have. As Mary Lynn has mentioned, I knew Jay since his coming to Wisconsin and having worked earlier with the state legislature. And so I could probably give you a bio, but it wouldn't be due justice to this young man's background and accomplishments. So I will take the email bio that he sent to me and without the notes saying, get it right. So, yeah. But Jay is a person who has been with Common Cause for 10 years. He assumed the Executive Directorship in 1996. And he did, before that, served for three years as government affairs and Chief Lobbyist, really, for the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Prior to coming to, he came to Wisconsin in 1988 to assume an assistant role to then Senate Majority Leader, Joe Stroll, and then worked in our Senate Democratic Caucus, particularly in the area of media where I got to work with Joe on media presentations. And we won't talk about the quality thereof, but he did a good job in trying to make sure and make my presentations as good as possible. He worked in that capacity until his taking the job at the Independent Colleges and Universities. He does bring to his Executive Directorship also experience on a federal level. He worked for a congressman from Pennsylvania in the 1980s. And so when he talks about what's going on in Madison, what's going on in Washington, D.C., he really does bring a real world experience having worked in both arenas, and that I think has served him well in his directorship. He also was an active in the John Anderson presidential campaign of 1980. And so again, he brings a myriad of good experience. He's a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a 1979 graduate with honors from Miami University. He's married, has two children, and resides in the fine city of Madison. And without further damaging his career and his accomplishments, I'll turn it over to Jay. Jay, we're delighted that you can stand us. And we had a most interesting conversation in our last episode. These are sort of like the Star Trek episodes. You know, it's a star year 22.4, but talking about really the extraordinary times in Wisconsin now. Governor Doyle is up to his neck, I think, in hot water, we can all agree. The Scott Jensen coming up for trial. These are interesting times for Wisconsin politics, and we talked about some of the ethics, proposed ethics reforms. I just wanted to focus a little bit more on your sense of just kind of a political junkie. And just flat out supporter of Jim Doyle, I've always liked Jim Doyle, a little disturbed or a little discouraged about what's going on. Are these three issues, we have the, I call it travel gate after the Clinton debacle some years ago, the problem with the DOT fundraiser, and the quantum nuclear power plant. Right, the power plant, the contributions to the utilities while the PSC was considering their application. Just how damaging are these in a really, I think we can all agree is going to be an extremely hotly contested gubernatorial race. Does this sink him? Well, it doesn't help, as they say. Well, look, first of all. We'll write that down. It's not helpful. Well, look, the governor is, I think, in some trouble. There's no question about it, and it's an election year, and obviously there'll be partisans on the other side. They'll seek to take political advantage of it. But you know, the question, in each instance, it's, you know, without going into great detail. I mean, the thread through all of it is this sort of perceived need to raise a great deal of money to be elected governor of Wisconsin. And, you know, if you look at the so-called travel gate, what it involves, basically, is the awarding of a travel contract involving University of Wisconsin personnel. The idea was to award the contract to one agency to save the state money so that personnel at the UW were not making their own arrangements to travel all over wherever they have to go. Made sense. But the question, though, became why did the contract, why was it awarded to this one agency when on the first round of consideration, you know, another agency actually scored better in terms of lower cost. The contract was held open where there was one individual who has been indicted now for two felonies who insisted that it be held open. And the criminal indictment says that it was quote unquote for political considerations, including keeping her own job and also giving advantage to her supervisors. So the question on that, really, is what was the political consideration? Was it the fact that the travel agency owner contributed $7,000 or $10,000 to Governor Doyle's reelection campaign and somebody else on the board, another $10,000? Was that it? It's not named in the indictment, but the question is whether there was pressure brought to bear. So again, it's the money. It sort of was that the driving problem there. And we'll see. I mean, the governor, I'll take him in his word, didn't know Georgia Thompson, the person who was indicted, probably didn't have any say whatsoever in the awarding of the contract, but were there people who were political appointments of the governor who did? And so that's, as they said in the Watergate scandal, what did they know and when did they know it? That's what we're gonna have to find out. That's the investigation. And the same thing, the other thing, the number two person at the Department of Transportation was just cleared by the State Ethics Board of having acted improperly. But here's the problem. The number two person at DOT held a fundraiser for the governor for his reelection and invited contractors, engineering firms that did business with the Department of Transportation and actually encouraged those folks to come to the fundraiser. And while it technically wasn't in violation of the law, the Ethics Board itself said it should be, it should be illegal and obviously because of the conflict. Again, the overriding concern seemed to be this need to raise the money for the reelection. And then finally, the Kiwani Nuclear Power Plant. Two members of the Public Service Commission changed their vote on whether or not to sell the Kiwani Nuclear Power Plant to a Virginia utility company. Was it because in the time between they changed their vote and they reconsidered, or they voted and they reconsidered, utility companies contributed some 30,000 or more to the governor's reelection campaign? That's under investigation. But again, it's this money or the perceived need to raise the money. So that's the governor's own particular problem. But certainly his Republican opponents have got problems too. They sure do. Congressman Green over the years accepted $30,000 from Tom DeLay who's now stepped down as majority leader of the US House of Representatives. That money appears to be tainted. Green says he's not gonna spend it on his reelection. There's money from Jack Abramoff which went exclusively to Republicans and people are returning that money if they received it. And so there's this whole now thing about we wanna be clean, we wanna be reformers and everybody's scurrying for the political cover. And so, but it's gonna be tough for the governor. There's no question about it. And one of the things that's disappointing to me frankly is, and I'll make a confession, I voted for him too. And I voted for him because he of all the candidates running both in the Democratic primary and in the general election in 2002 was the one who was most vehement about reform. The one who was most vehement about cleaning up Wisconsin politics. This is at the time of the legislative caucus scandal when Chuck Kuala and Scott Jensen had just been criminally charged. Doyle said one of his first acts as governor would be to clean up campaign finance and corruption in Madison. And then he becomes governor and that became a secondary, even a tertiary consideration. We haven't heard anything about reform until recently. And so that's been terribly disappointing. So it's a problem, it's a bipartisan problem. And interestingly enough, corruption and politics and reform I think is gonna be an issue this year in a way that we haven't seen it as an issue probably any other year since maybe 1974. I think when Cal Potter was first elected to the legislature that was considered the Watergate year. And a lot of folks were swept into office because of the scandal in Washington which sort of reverberated around the country. We're not that far away from November elections and I just am interested in all of your responses. Are there candidates though who are really coming up who are talking about these issues and really running on these issues? I get discouraged that the process itself is so daunting that you can't get into a race to even raise the issue because you don't have enough money or enough backing. And I guess I'm pretty cynical about, we talked in the last show only 6% of Wisconsin residents think legislators are working for them. The other 94% of us, are we gonna be able to, is there gonna be a clean sweep? You know, I mean, do you sweep Doyle away? Do you get anything better with Green or with Walker? And Tom, I don't know what your thoughts are on that. I mean, just following the Milwaukee County exec, I mean, he inherited a situation and he got a handle on it. So whether when he moves to, if he got elected to the governor, would he keep that same kind of philosophy or would it change? But it seemed like he got a handle on some of the corruption that was going in the county government there. One of the disturbing things about the political scene today is not only the money, but there has been a fragmentation of the electorate into special interests that oftentimes not so much with money, but with modern technology today can rattle the cage of a legislator very quickly, whether it's the right to life people, the NRA people. When those issues come up, the emails come out, the communications come out, and a lot of politicians today don't take on a lot of broad based general issues like education or something like that, but they do talk about some of these one issue things that where they know there's a constituency out there that electronically is tied to their membership and can get out votes. And they just say, well, not only do they count up the dollars, they say, well, if I add up all these groups and if I get 51% of the vote, everybody else be damned. I don't have to follow what somebody else cares about healthcare or education or under sort of good public policy things. All I have to be right is on these special interests, these very monolithic groups that are out there and are very expressive on their issue. On the national level, I don't see anybody, there's just a sense that everybody's corrupt and what difference does it make with the old who song? Here's the meet the new boss, same as the old boss. On a local level, when you talk about assembly races and perhaps Senate seats, it would just be intriguing to see if somebody would look into the camera and say, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna limit my campaign to X number of dollars. I'm only gonna accept money from my district. I'm only gonna accept more than $100 per person. And I'm gonna publish this on the web so you all know where the money's coming from. Because I can't run it with the money I've got and there's no public financing yet. And actually just challenge whoever they're running against and I would hope somebody would do that with live them here in town, just to take that on. We're not gonna accept any other money outside of that and maybe no PAC money. And put some rules down and then let's have public debates in a variety of places where people can know and see us and go on shows like this and public television and actually have a race and a debate. Now maybe that's idealistic, but it'd be interesting to see if the public would respond to that on a local level. I think it might. I'm a little more optimistic than Mary Lynn about that. I would be very pessimistic because I would say that one of the repercussions of people being only 6% positive about their elected officials is they've turned off to them. They're irrelevant. They don't listen. I don't think they would listen to a politician coming out and saying, I'm gonna limit my campaign funding and so on. I think it's gotten so bad and it smells so bad that people are saying, I'm not even gonna listen to you because I don't think you're telling me the truth. So I don't know that anybody could sincerely sell in this environment that they are really gonna spend very little and be an ethical candidate. And maybe we're gonna have to have a generation of citizen candidates then. I was intrigued about a comment you made in the last segment we talked about where this generation of legislators are almost homegrown politicians that I know that Joe and Joe's no exception, and others I'm told went to candidate school and they were groomed to handle the media and to handle those types of things. And maybe it's gonna have to take just regular, folks interested in public affairs again to say I'm not a professional politician and perhaps it's gonna have to be tied to term limits. I'm a little more skeptical of term limits than some folks but maybe it was a promise that I'm gonna do this for six years or eight years and then I'm coming back and living here with you again. I don't know if that would generate some enthusiasm or not. And local levels, I don't think anybody's cares about Congress. Well, you know. I really don't, I mean. First of all, the Congressional seats are gerrymandered and not competitive anyway. There are no, there are no, there's really no competitive Congressional seats in Wisconsin. In 1998 there were as many as four. Now there's not, you could argue maybe the Fox Valley where Mark Green's leaving is somewhat competitive but every other one is utterly uncompetitive and in the legislature too, there's only a handful of seats that are really truly competitive. Most have been gerrymandered as you mentioned and totally safe. I mean, the proof of that is that Scott Jensen who was criminally charged in 2002 has been reelected twice as he was criminally charged because the district he represents has been so Republican. Gary George for years reelected, although people had a sense that he was, you know, less than above board, reelected overwhelmingly until finally he was taken out in the primary. But so that's the problem is that you don't, you don't have competitive elections. People do become frustrated and they do say thing, they do turn to solutions like term limits. That happened in many states about 10 years ago in 1994. But the alternative to term limits would be campaign finance reform and the model, and there's one in place that we could emulate is Minnesota. I mean, the difference between Minnesota is what? They have more Swedes, we have more Norwegians but basically we're pretty much the same. There's not a lot of difference, you know. They got Garrison Keeler. They got Garrison Keeler, you know. And not enough Irish. Well, that's right. We have more Germans, we drink more beer, but they probably drink more vodka. So, you know, but the point is that it works there because they in 1994 put in a place in a system of reform where they had some public money and they had spending limits and every legislative candidate, everyone Republican or Democrat abides by spending limits in Minnesota so they operate on an equal playing field. Everybody raises the same amount of money, spends the same amount of money. The lower house has turned over several times during that period because it's won on ideas. If the governor's race is in Minnesota, the spending limit's $2 million. Jesse Ventura was elected for better or for worse in 1998, but he was elected not because of money. He was elected because he did better in debates than Norm Coleman or Hubert Humphrey III. And people liked that. It was a battle of ideas in Minnesota. We don't have that here. In Wisconsin, whoever has the most money wins the race. And I think there is a chance that we could return and sort of emulate Minnesota. And at least if the Packers can't beat the Vikings, we could at least do as well as Minnesota does in our elections. We can come back to that place, I'm convinced. I think- Could PAC committees take place of the candidates spending money? So the candidates, as I promised, I'm not gonna spend X amount of dollars or this is the amount that I'm- But then there's maybe 15, 20, 30 PAC committees that can go ahead and continue to spend and on behalf of the candidate. Well, what you can do, and Senator Ellis who we talked about, I mean, his plan basically, and it's pretty radical, what he says is that you have spending limits, but what you also do is you provide some public financing to candidates who are the targets of those outside groups. So let's say you're a Republican candidate and the teachers union, WEAC, says we're gonna spend a half a million dollars to defeat you. Well, under the Ellis plan, you would be eligible to receive public financing to match the money that WEAC spends. And what Ellis, who is a fiscal conservative, bets, and I think he's right, is that WEAC wouldn't spend the money. Why would they? It would be an inefficient use of their money if you're going to be matched with an equal amount to defend yourself. So WEAC then does not spend the money against you. Instead what they do is they go on the ground and they spend money like they used to. I mean, I'm just old enough to remember when teachers would come to my door or business people from the Chamber of Commerce and said we think you should vote for this person because we think they'd be good for business or for good for education. That's what they should be doing. They shouldn't be spending their money on attack ads on TV. So the beauty of the Ellis plan in my view is that it sort of encourages those outside groups to stay out and get involved in other ways. And then it becomes a battle of ideas rather than money. And I think if we did that, if we had something like that in place in Wisconsin, people would have much more confidence that their government wasn't being bought and paid for. We'd have more people that would run for office because they wouldn't feel like they have to take out a second mortgage on their soul in order to run for office. So I think there's a lot of positive benefits to having reform. And look, people's faith in government right now, it can't go any lower. I'm an optimist, you have to be as a reformer. It can only get better. My wife would suggest I'm in denial, but I'm actually an optimist that we can actually have a system in place that would be better for all of us. And we can reconnect people to their government, which I think is desperately needed. Then you have all the legal challenges though. You just issued a press release on the Supreme Court sending back the Wisconsin Right to Life challenge to the McCain Fine Gold Act. And so does money equal free speech? The courts have muddied the waters. I mean, there's no doubt about it. And comprehensive campaign reform can be termed or can be framed as a difficult unconstitutional. Denial of free speech, free access to being able to express your ideas and so forth. It's tough. Well, as you might imagine, you can write a campaign finance law and we've done this with Senator Ellis that would survive constitutional scrutiny. And you can do it in such a way. You can't force a candidate, for instance, to take public financing. You can't force them to agree to spending limits, but you can provide incentives for them to do so. If it's voluntary, you're not compelling them to do it. So you can construct a system. And in the case of Wisconsin Right to Life, I mean, one of the great misnomers is that campaign finance reform somehow restricts free speech. It really doesn't. It really doesn't. Well, no, in fact, money does not equal speech. Money equals more speech. And the more money you have, the more speech you have. But it's not, it doesn't, if you have reform, that doesn't mean you can't speak. Wisconsin Right to Life wanted to be able to run ads, depicting Senator Feingold in the period right before the election. But they wanted to, and they can still do that. They can run ads. All groups do it. There's no problem with that. But they wanted to be able to use undisclosed, unregulated money, which is against the law in Wisconsin and against the law on the federal level. But they wanted to be able to use it. They claimed it was for lobbying. Well, in fact, it wasn't for lobbying purposes. They wanted to influence the outcome of the election. But they claim it's for lobbying. What's interesting is Wisconsin Right to Life didn't run those ads after the election. They didn't run those ads in the period before the election, six months before, when the issue they were talking about was really most cogent. They did it, they wanted to do it in the period right before the election to influence the outcome. So you have to face these things head on and you have to take them. And obviously they have to survive constitutional scrutiny. The US Supreme Court upheld the McCain-Feingold bill in just two years ago. And I think five-four. Five-four. Well, that's right. And as you might imagine, one of the reasons why Right to Life would bring this challenge up is they're hoping there'll be a different outcome, ultimately with the different composition of the Supreme Court. Although I would be doubtful that would happen because I think the US Supreme Court would be very hesitant to overturn a precedent that was set so recently on this issue. Okay. So they have told us in their hearings. Okay, we've focused a great deal on the previous program in this one so far on Alice's plan and Wisconsin's plan. You're affiliated with the National Common Cause and we have Abramoff scandal. It's probably in dollars and cents, a lot worse than the Wisconsin scene. What are you hearing from the National Common Cause about prognosis for real reform, if any, and who are the leaders on the federal level to bring this about? Well, the name's John McCain and Russ Feingold, you know, I mean, it's whenever most reform tends to be with the reform-oriented legislators and they've proved to be a pretty potent combination, but the question on the federal level right now is more lobbying reform. It's not so much campaign finance reform. And, you know, look, when I was an aide in Washington, I got free trips all over the world and I was definitely influenced. I still to this day have very favorable feelings about Taiwan. I got a free trip to go to Taiwan and it certainly influenced how I feel about it. And there's been, that actually is, some of the free travel has been cut over the years, but what it's been replaced by at the federal level has been these smaller trips, but with more campaign contributions. And certainly Abramoff gave a lot of money only to Republican candidates, but he gave trips to both sides. But there is a move underway at the federal level to make it so that it's next impossible to accept free things. Right now there's a $49 or $50 limit on lunches. I mean, I could get a pretty big lunch for 50 bucks in Sheboygan or Madison, but the idea is that a lot of people would, they would take, lobbyists would take congressmen out and they'd spend $49 many times so that they would never come up to that $50 limit. So there's reform and basically, you know, who's got the best model in the nation, Wisconsin. Our model, as you know, and the legislature is with the cup of coffee roll. If it's worth more than a cup of coffee, you can't take anything from a lobbyist. And they should do that at the federal level. There's absolutely no reason why staff people and congressmen should be getting free gifts or free lunches because, you know, let's be honest. I mean, it does have an influence on how people behave. So there is legislation afoot and because of the fallout from the Abramoff scandal and Tom DeLay, my guess is they'll get some lobby reform. Yeah, my sense is that, again, these are just political tsunamis really, in some respects. I mean, to have DeLay taken down, to me, that was... Significant. Significant. There we go. It was something that I just simply would not believe could have ever happened. And Abramoff kind of seemed to creep up on everyone, but there's someone whose tentacles are absolutely everywhere. And, you know, so maybe there are some possibilities. And I really like Ken's idea. Just a real, what would it be like, and we've talked about third party politics and typically it would come out of a third party, but what would it be like really to have an election that is fought on ideas and not in the media and not on pandering TV commercials that dumb down the American consciousness to it's morning in America. See, I thought when the 94 election was a campaign of ideas with the Republicans. Contract with America. I mean, that was really... And I hate to stop this show, but we're out of... That was ideas. But they've all, they've become... I know. They've compromised their ideas. They've compromised. I agree. And we're out of time. And we have to finish with a contract on America, which breaks my heart, Tom, but in any event, Jay has been wonderful. Thank you for traveling to Sheboygan. Love it. And I will be with you again. Thank you.