 Welcome back to the Donahue Group. We're feisty and ready to go here on this episode and talking about state issues. Joining me is former state Senator Cal Potter, Professor Tom Pineski, mathematics professor at UW-Chaboygan. Ken Risto, the fun part of the equation, the truth teller as he is telling us, a social studies teacher in the Chaboygan area school district. No, Tom said that off camera, I didn't say that. All right, very good. I'm just a simple social studies teacher trying to get by. There you go. And I'm Mary Lynn Donahue, just a simple country lawyer. Trying to get by. Trying to get by. Just a little help from your friends. I'm sitting on top of the mountain. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I just become Buddha. Well, and we're full of wisdom and all sorts of insights today talking about lots of stuff going on at the state level. And we had alluded to just getting back to the big race in April of 2007 on a state basis, of course, is the Supreme Court Justice race. There will be a woman. It'll either be Annette Ziegler or attorney Linda Clifford from Madison. Judge Ziegler is from Washington County. She was appointed by Tommy Thompson in the mid-90s, I believe. Linda Clifford is a longtime lawyer with a Madison law firm and well respected as an attorney. And as we talked about in our local show, Linda Clifford got schvetzt, severely beaten in Sheboygan County, capturing only about 16, 17% of the vote. And that Ziegler did very well. Judge Ziegler also did extremely well statewide. This promises to be an incredibly expensive election. Both Clifford and Ziegler have raised about the same amounts of money, but the special interests, as they call them, the... Independent expenditure. The independent expenditure groups have been out in force for Judge Ziegler. I know people in Sheboygan who got five robo calls, as they're called, automatic phone calls from the Chamber of Commerce and a variety of other organizations. We got one Linda Clifford one from Senator Feingold. So it's, I just think robo calls are terrible. I don't care who's calling, I find it extremely irritating to have a recorded voice on the other end of the line. I don't know how you guys feel about it, but it must work because they're putting a lot of money into it. Well, there was a lot of media, also radio and even TV. I don't know about TV, but certainly radio. I mean, every time I had the radio on, it seemed like Ziegler had a little message that was about the Supreme Court. I actually didn't know who the other two candidates were. I just knew that Ziegler was a candidate. That's exactly right. That was my same experience too. I got a call from Ziegler, or whoever, on the end of the telephone. And it seemed like on the radio, when I was listening to commercial radio, Ziegler was the only name I was hearing. And so if you're the average voter walking in the booth, I would think that's about the only name you might be familiar with. Yeah, because you've heard it so many times. Annie was, she was supported by the majority of police and that was sort of the ad and sheriffs and departments around the state, DAs. If you'll remember that the attorney general's race in the end ended up costing $3.3 million with independent expenditures and so forth, the potential for the cost of this race is really incredibly high. And the concern that I have is that at least we perceive that our justice system is not for sale by special interest groups and yet in order to run a competitive statewide race, who's going to do it? It's somebody who is either independently wealthy or who has the ties because of ideological orientation to special interest groups that have a whole lot of money. And I'm talking on both sides of the aisle here. There has been talk for a long time that has gone absolutely nowhere about true public financing for Supreme Court justice races. And from my perspective, as I watched this sorry spectacle of endorsements and I frankly want a judge who's pretty independent and who's every vote I do not know in advance of the election, a judge who will come to it. What's the current situation? We have seven justices. Seven justices? And a conservative is retired, is that it? John Wilcox is retiring, who is not a trial court judge. Judge Ziegler is making a lot out of the fact that she is a trial court judge. And is the court kind of split on that? Very much. This is being perceived as this person will be the swing vote on a variety of issues. On a variety of issues. And that's why everybody's saddling up and writing checks. And it's interesting because no matter what, we'll have four women and three men, no matter what the... And it was that way for a while before Justice Sykes went to the Seven Circuit Court of Appeals. But when loser draw, and depending on just how ugly this campaign gets, and it got real ugly real quick out of the box, there should be public financing. Let me make the pitch at least for Supreme Court Justices. I mean, they call it independent expenditures, but you know the fancy name at the bottom of the screen is the Chamber of Commerce, or maybe a labor organization or whatever it would be. And the candidate knows that. And I wouldn't want to walk into a courtroom knowing that that person got several hundred thousand dollars in their campaign from a group that I might be in litigation with or something. It just takes the objectivity right from it. It used to be the Supreme Court election was the last vestige of using public financing. Legislators abandoned it early on and so did the governor's office because they couldn't, spending limits were so low. But the courts historically never spent that much. And as a result, they did use public financing, but it's only been the last couple of races now that has just changed. And it's getting to be most of the ads, as you can see by the disclaimer are not coming from the candidate themselves. But I don't think that's a good thing. Yeah, it's yes and no. The public gets to tell the rest of the public who they want to support because they want to express their ideology. In Congress or in the state legislature, when you give contributions to candidates, you then hope to have their ear on legislation. You will meet with them, you'll lobby with them, you call, you don't do that to judges. You don't call a judge. I don't think you call a judge and say, you know, this is coming up. I need your support on this. That doesn't happen. That's crossing the ethical line. Well, you kind of front load the system though because you know that you have a judge who has been supported by all of these groups and so you infer that if you bring an environmental challenge to a law that the judge would rule this way or would rule that way. Yeah, but it's by inference. You don't get the, you don't get the lobbying like you do if you buy influence with a legislative kind of race. It's a pretty straight line drawing though, I think. But what we really need more than anything from my perspective on the court, liberal or conservative are people who are smart and who are hardworking and who have good legal minds. And our Supreme Court has some fine legal minds on it. And I know nothing about Judge Ziegler from, the journal Sentinel likes her as a trial judge that she gets high marks as a trial judge. I have no way of knowing that one way or the other. Linda Clifford is extremely bright. I've watched her work and I would believe that. But leave the ideology out of it. And the one way to do that is from my perspective is not make the appearance that the election is for sale, that the chair is for sale. Well, that's my concern too is that even if a judge arrives independently after a well-reasoned walk through the case and writes an opinion or the court writes an opinion, now the premise is always going to be, well, let's follow the campaign money and now the legitimacy of the justice system is really called into question. It could very well be that the judges, once they get behind those closed doors, will not pay any attention to where the money came from. And that's true. It's a tenured term and you figure, whatever. But now you're gonna have at least, again, the appearance of, and in the age that we live in, which is the age of cynicism, it's really gonna be very difficult for the court to continue to try to impress the public with the legitimacy of its decisions, which is the heart and soul of the system. Well, there's also another aspect to this sort of revisionist thinking about campaigns and that's the Right to Life lawsuit that was before Judge Shabazz, where they sued based on the rule that's in effect where judges were not supposed to tell how they would rule in a case. And the Right to Life says they should be able to tell you how they would rule. Well, God, I would not wanna judge previously coming out and saying, well, this case came before me, this is how I would rule. I mean, when objectivity is protected there, I don't see where that is. I don't know if that's being appealed or not. I know Judge Shabazz about three weeks ago ruled, upheld the rule, but I don't know if it's being appealed or not. And in other permutations, the Minnesota rule that was quite similar to that, which really prohibited judges from talking about their feelings on various issues, was ruled to be a violation of the First Amendment. And so what you really need, what you really need are judges who will say, I'm not going to tell you how I'm gonna vote on something because I don't know. Because I'm gonna look at the facts before me and the law as it exists at the time before me and that's how I'm gonna make a decision. And if you want a decision from me now, you need to vote for somebody else. But in this day and age, I don't know if that kind of purity of response gets you elected. Now, can I ask another question related? Do all states have elected Supreme Court judges? No. Some are appointed by the governor? Right. Or by the legislature? Very political. Actually, this is the least political because there's no appointed mechanism. People get to vote. Well, it depends. The federal bench, of course, is a lifetime appointment which should really remove all pressure on how you're going to vote that you should feel completely independent. And yet, there's now certain judges are being, federal judges are being targeted by certain groups for not being tough enough on sentencing, for example. Oh, no, but I'm thinking of state, the various states of Supreme Court. But I mean, it's the same. It's a wide range of different, sometimes the legislature appoints, sometimes the governor appoints, sometimes it's elections. It really varies from state to state. And there are pluses and minuses to an election versus an appointive system. Yeah, the appointed system, you don't have to spend all these millions of dollars for a race. Oh, exactly, exactly. Well, it'll be interesting to see how it... The key thing is the length of the term. That's really what insulates you. I mean, that in reality, that's why the framers had lifetime appointments. They were just absolutely adamant after their experience with the king's judges who served in his pleasure, or her pleasure, in the court, that they wanted an independent judiciary. We don't do that in Wisconsin. 10 years is plenty long, to be sure. So that's what gives them the independence. So I know this is, I have Marilyn's absolutely right here. This is gonna be just one ugly, very demeaning race for both candidates. And at the end, whoever puts the black robot and sits in that chair is going to be, certainly not somebody we necessarily want to admire. Kind of having to brush things off. Brush the stuff off your roll. Well, let's move on. Just to segue off of that, just today, Ziegler got Governor Thompson's endorsement. Attorney Clifford has endorsements from former governors, Dreyfus and Lucy. So that's kind of getting balanced out a little bit. I guess getting Governor McCallum's endorsement may not be all that valuable at this point, but when you talk about purism, and I guess I'm even purer in this topic, very few times I can say that in the show. But I'm not sure why Russ Feingold's in injecting himself in this process as a federal judge. It's to win. I understand that. But I really don't like elected officials and separations of powers to be, what do I care what Russ Feingold feels or Dreyfus or whomever? I guess it gives voters cues as to where they might be politically coming from, but when we're back to portraying judges as no different than, and they may not be any different, I suppose in the final analysis, but there's something about courts and why they wear black robes and have certain types of rituals is to give at least the public the impression that they're different than other elected officials and to again have them seeking out and getting an endorsement makes them look cheap. Well, I wanted to use that to segue into former Governor Thompson's presidential race. And he is working at it. He is, he is working at it. Good luck. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Are you kidding? He gets back on the national stage for a while. Okay. Al Sharpton got the national stage for a while. Now, are you analogized? I'm not comparing Thompson to Sharpton, but you knew, you know, they're not going anywhere, but he gets a forum. Well, does he get a lot, you know, he gets some campaign money that he can later spend for something else? Well, Tommy says he has to raise $2.5 million to be competitive in Iowa. $2.5 million for Iowa. But he is holding out, according to the journal Sentinel, high hopes that he will perform well in the Republican straw poll that's set for August 11th in Iowa. So, it's interesting, just today, former Governor Vilsack, former Governor, or is he current Governor, Vilsack, dropped out of the presidential race, and all sorts of interesting stuff going on with the presidential race. Maybe we'll have to expand our area of inquiry just as the- But it's so early, isn't it? Yes. It's wildly early. But that leads me to another topic, which I think is interesting, which is the placement of the Wisconsin primary. The presidential primary will be held in February of 2008. It used to be the very definition of irrelevant. By moving it up into February, it has become certainly more relevant. But it depends on, right now, on where it's placed. We might, there's some early Super Tuesday primary, I think, in early February. The Wisconsin primary, I think, is February 19th in that area, and then you have the traditional March, early March, Super Tuesday primary. So, I think it's a great idea that Wisconsin could be a player. You can vote however you want to vote. You don't have to vote a party line. Our media, I think, is a little less expensive, maybe, than California or New York, and kinda played to the local issues. That we don't have to vote a party line where other states have to vote a party line. It gives us a kind of a cross-section of what the country might be doing and makes Wisconsin a player, because we can do that. And what is happening is that, for example, the Republican primary is usually, the evangelical right has been sort of anointing the winner in the Republican party, and they can do that in many states that have caucus systems and so on. But when you get into the open primary as Wisconsin has, in many cases, that gives a Giuliani and others, even Tommy Thompson, for that matter, if he does well in Iowa and Wisconsin, it gives them a visibility that they wouldn't have if it just were pretty a caucus system or some other type of party system in other states. So, yeah, I think for a number of reasons, we could play a more important role. And I'd like to see more states go into that, because when you see what's happened to the Republican party, and it's not, I'm not here to bash Republicans, as although I do that sometimes, you see a lot of people like McCain and others running to the right when, you know they're not that far right, but they're doing it because they know that they have to get to the primary. If you could set up a system where it really would reflect the national view and really who could be winnable, you wouldn't have these candidates pandering to the extremes that I think is now happening. I mean, I think there was a lot of astonishment that George Bush could have won the nomination as opposed to John McCain, but it was clearly that primary system that Bush had really worked, and it may be the reason that Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination because the system is work, the party lines are, the party connections are made, and you have the whole infrastructure and so no matter what the popular feeling might be is that candidates get catapulted that way, and who was talking $1 trillion? I was. Okay, tell us what that was. Well, I was, you know, listening to NPR and they were talking to a Democratic fundraiser the other last night as I was driving home, and they were talking about California moving their primary, which was really becoming irrelevant when it was in June. I'm not quite sure. For February. Really February. Really front-loading it. And they were saying, it was a staggering thing, that they said that, he said, if he was accurate, that when you look at all the money raised nationally for presidential elections, Californians contribute something like 30% or some huge amount, and they give all this money, but they have very little say as to who the actual nominees are in the end of the process. So they wanted to keep some of the California dollars in a home for influence. But he was saying that given all the candidates and how it might be fairly competitive, by the time we get done before the general election, just the primary cycle of this election cycle, $1 trillion will probably be spent on the campaign. $1 trillion. The primary. Right, and everybody, this is kind of interesting. I kind of liken it to sitting in a basketball game and one person stands up and they get a better view than everybody. Everybody's rushing forward. I think nobody's really, on the party level, really thought about what the effect of that's going to be. And I think what's going to happen is you're going to have all of the primary thing, season clustered into these early months. And I don't know at what point you finally say, well, we're not going to do these things in the even numbers and you all end up in the odd numbers. Right, I mean, why not move it up to now? I mean, it's just, it really is mathematical. The effect of that's going to be, I think, is you're going to have it so compact that first of all, we don't have a real staggering vetting process. And secondly, it's going to really play into candidates who can raise huge amounts of money fairly quickly. Jimmy, a guy like Jimmy Carter would never get elected in this new cycle. Carter kind of came out of the caucuses. They would do media rather than state visits. Right, he went to New Hampshire, did that sort of retail politics, met people, created some buzz, went to Iowa. I don't know if the Iowa caucuses were actually in play in 76, but he had a small venue and then media paid attention to him and then some money came in. A candidate like that, even Bill Clinton wouldn't get a nominated. I mean, maybe good news or bad news, depending on your perspective, but Clinton, you know, he took a pounding in New Hampshire, but was able to, actually he took a pounding, able to make his case to a small audience, a small media. If you took a scandal like Jennifer Flowers in a California market, you wouldn't have the money or the time to respond to that one way or the other. I think it's gonna have a real profound effect and it's gonna make money more important and media more important and say what you want about the non-representation of New Hampshire and Iowa and some of these earlier primaries, but at least the candidates have to meet people face to face, make their case, and those folks for whatever their lack of representation, take it seriously, they really watch those candidates and look and pay attention. Now it's gonna be what you see on TV and I just don't think it's gonna be good for the process. Yeah. Well, interesting enough and we'll see what role Wisconsin ends up playing. Governor Doyle's state of the state address had something for everybody. It was really... Imagine that. It was fairly remarkable, particularly the representative who stood up to applaud the governor's and mention of oil profits as really the way to go. You know, you like those guys that are just kind of out there. Yeah, I thought it was great. One of the things in our, the Wisconsin Academy group that all of us here belong to, gathered last week and talked about healthcare and health insurance provisions that are in the budget. The governor's healthcare task force came up with a plan. There are other plans out there. What is amazing to me is that, not amazing, but one of our speakers pointed out, has it happened in Wisconsin finally that there is what he called the tipping point? In other words, that businesses before five years ago who might have yelled socialized medicine, oh, this is the worst thing in the world, now there are four or five actually fairly well thought out, thoughtful health insurance. Universal coverage plans out there, some that may cost more or may cost less or whatever. But have we reached the tipping point where employers say, we just can't do this anymore. We cannot handle this anymore. I'm curious, I don't know what the legislature's gonna do with any or all of the proposals, but to me they're pretty, they didn't get very far in the Republican legislature, but I'm thinking these days it might be a little different. Well, I think once you start taking the old coalition that was against it, which included the business community, the insurance community, the old state-moneyed benefactors from the system, now that you've got that division, I think people are starting to look at the fact that in the nation 46 million people without a health insurance, insurance companies taking 30, 40% of the money that's spent on health care and looking at what the cost of it is, everybody's looking at this and saying, our businesses are a competitive disadvantage to other industrialized countries, people aren't covered, all these things are piling up. And I think your analogy of a tipping point is probably that all of these groups are saying, yeah, things aren't all rosy in the garden here, let's start looking at solving this problem. And I think people are now open. When Hillary first led the charge, everybody dumped on her and she was out the door in six months with no hope. I think that's not gonna happen this time. The problems are of great enough magnitude and there's a coalition of people talking that I think there's real hope may take two years, three years, but I think there's real hope for some change. And I think there's a recognition on the federal level at least that both Medicare and medical assistants are very efficiently run. The numbers we heard is that their overhead costs or their administrative costs are about 4%, whereas private insurance companies run anywhere from 20 to 40%. And so this is contrary to what Rush Limbaugh might say, that there are some areas where the federal government has run. Are you losing the rush? I am, how did you know? This is all I know from Al Franken. This is what Al Franken says Rush Limbaugh says. I could be wrong. That might be a misrepresentation, but... Al Franken said it was probably more articulate. He's running for the Senate. That's right. Yeah, well, he seems to have lost his sense of humor, which is really, really too bad, but... Take this off, wait, sorry. But I think you're right. I think businesses, when businesses finally say we've gotta find some kind of a solution, I don't know if the road takes you to a single payer system. I don't think Americans are quite ready for that yet, but at least there are some plans that are being out there and they're being discussed seriously. And I think everybody recognizes that it's gonna have to happen at the state level because it's not gonna happen at least in the next couple of years and the national level yet. And I think the bucks are talking. I mean, even there's plans coming from the EFL, CIO, and so on, models sort of after workers comp, where the cost per employee, I think they're talking, four, six hundred dollars, well, family plans that businesses are paying are eleven, twelve hundred dollars. I mean, eventually you get to a point where you say, hey, I'm gonna listen to you here. You're less than half of what I'm paying. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And of course, there continue to be quality issues in American healthcare and so it's complex. We just have a couple of minutes left, but I did want to, I think that we should, as a group, spend a little time congratulating both the Assembly and the Senate for having passed, at long last, the Ethics Reform Bill, which was in front of it. The Assembly passed 97 to two. The Senate passed unanimously. The bill, which abolishes both the State Elections Board and the State Ethics Board, combines them in one organization that has true investigation power, hopefully non-partisan, even-handed investigation power. I think it's a good start. Now we need to do something about the thing that gets politicians in trouble, so they don't have to come before this new body with their baggage and their law-breaking activities. We need campaign finance reform. Yeah, true stuff that is out there and that really works. Otherwise you're gonna take these judges and they're gonna look at a lot of this stuff and say, this is almost like a sandbox type situation. He said, she said, they did this and then there's maybe the system structure that has now been put in place that this won't work as well until we fix the other part of it. Yeah, so. When something passes 97 to two, is it meaningful at all? I mean, I hate to get into the cynic here. I was just beating up. That's probably a combination. It was watered down and second. I've had a chance to see the conversation back and forth. I know we know the Democrats in the national level were congratulating themselves to the point of breaking their arm on ethics reform and there are such big loopholes in that law that it's not gonna change dramatically anything, in my view. So when I see something passed that overwhelmingly, it seems to me that we're looking at symbolism that will then stop. You are cynical, you really are. Well, we'll see how it goes and I think they'll continue to be efforts to bring forth what we call real campaign finance reform. I'm not real sure what that is precisely and I think it means different things to different people but as time goes on and the elections board is a thing of the past. So on that happy note, thank you. Thank you.