 Welcome to the Donahue group. Glad you could join us. We're talking about state issues. Before we get going, I'd like to introduce our group to my close right, Ken Risto. Just sort of in charge of social studies. There you go. In charge of social studies, sort of, for the Shabuagan area school district. Yeah, it's a title. Tom Panesky, sort of in charge of mathematics for the UW Shabuagan. Cal Potter, in charge of retirement. I'm in charge of nothing, but I'm here with a game face on. And it's a special day, because we are now celebrating our cable award of merit. Now, we celebrated this on the local show, but this is worth repeating. Along with seven other programs on channel eight, we have been awarded the Awards of Merit. And it is a great honor. We're pretty thrilled. Unfortunately, unlike the Emmys or the Oscars or whatever, we have to buy our awards. And we're cheap. I mean, not the award, but the symbol of winning. I think even the certificate might cost money. I'm not sure. Carrie is checking on that for us. But our little tasteful statuette or whatever, it is going to cost money. So if you want to send in money in care of the Donahue Group so that we can purchase this and have it on the table for every program, actually you don't have to do that. Among the four of us, we're going to take up a collection. And it's going to go from house to house on a monthly basis. On your wallets. And whoever has it will be responsible for bringing it in and in any event. Pretty cool. We're happy. And of course, we richly deserve this award. But we'd like to thank our producer. For matters of humility, ours is what I'm saying. Our camera folks and our own witty intelligence. And I said it on the first program. I'd like to say, again, I thank my mom and my husband and my children, who've been so supportive of my career through the years. And in the Immortal World Awards. Is there some music we can cue up to get her off the stage? In the Immortal Words of Sally Field, you really do like us. I thought that was pretty cute. All right, we're going to move on to actual serious business. Sally Field or you? Sally Field. Oh, OK. What apper in any event. Lots to talk about at the state level. Our legislators and governor, thankfully, are still trying, at least, to deal with our projected $527 million budget shortfall this year. The hospital tax is done. I'm convinced, Tom, dear Republican friend of mine, that if we tax the hospital under this particular proposal, the federal government reimburses the hospitals for said tax. Now, the only problem is, is you're going to have an attack ad that's going to say Republicans voted to increase taxes on hospitals. You guys wouldn't do that. Because the hospitals are for this tax. The hospitals are for this tax. It's not costing them anything. So can't the Republicans figure out a way to just pander-proof this? And that we could just move ahead with getting some money on. Wisconsin is about 47th in the number of states in terms of what we get from the federal government. The government money still is tax money. And the second thing is, the hospitals now will have services that they'll provide with this money. And then when that money goes away the next year and the next year and the next year, they won't get rid of the service. So they're going to have to raise the cost on the health care providers and everything else. So it's going to spin around and keep going up. But this is just a state federal shell game. The hospital pays the money to the state as a tax, and then the hospital gets said money from the feds as a reimbursement. I mean, there aren't any additional services. It's a shell game. I mean, in Wisconsin, we're not very good at sucking at the federal trot, not as good as Mississippi and Louise and West Virginia and so forth. I need a Bob Casten in there. Yeah. Oops. You said it. I said it. Not we. So there's a proposal to refinance the tobacco settlement, which was sold for pennies on the dollar in the McCallum administration to balance the budget. The state was due to get $1.2 billion of my recollection from the tobacco settlement. And they discounted it to a value of how many millions in order to get a present value out of it. There's some pluses and minuses to that. Should we just wait for the recession, first of all, to be declared and then to be over it? Well, you hear some people say, well, why is the state so deeply indebted? Well, this is also a projected deficit where the two-year budget, and there's still time to go on this budget. And so when we're talking about what will the deficit or the books look like a year from now, that's where the projected deficit is. And so some of the things we're talking about here are not trying to alleviate a debt that's been incurred. It's what will occur. Were we not to do anything? And the fiscal bureau and other financial gurus have said with a downturn in the economy, this is what the books will look like at the end of the two-year biennial budget. So when we look at these different creative mechanisms, there's time to implement them and time to make adjustments in the budget bill to balance the books. It's a lot better than it was a while back, if you remember, we had very substantial deficit in the state. So let's hope the economy doesn't turn down too much more. And I think this is a very doable situation. The problem, I guess, is you've got conservatives who don't want any type of revenue enhancements to be enacted. And so that's why this negotiations between the governor and particularly the legislature and the assembly, particularly, is taking so long. That's my sense. And I'm just interested in your viewpoint. You can certainly point to extraordinary pork and waste in the federal budget. But it's my sense that, I mean, other than the huge amount that we pay for prisons, our state tax dollars are pretty well used. Education, highways, it just seems to me that, number one, there aren't a lot of places to cut unless you really are gonna take developmentally disabled people and throw them back in institutions or out on the street or whatever. I don't know, true or false? No, I think they're well used. Especially in the university. Well, the university. Green Bay could stop sending me pencils, I wouldn't say. Yeah, the university gets pinched every once in a while and students are having to finance more and more of their education. But I used to have a book salesman that would come up from Kentucky. He said he actually eventually moved to Wisconsin from Kentucky. He says, I don't mind paying the extra taxes. They've got good school system. They got good parks. They got good libraries. They've got a lot of nice amenities and I know it costs money. So I remember that. So I figure it is well used. Our tax dollars are well used. I think Wisconsin has a system of sharing with the wealth of the state with units of government that a lot of people don't realize. About 75% of the state budget is formula driven. Meaning it's Medicare or Medicaid, excuse me, Medicaid or shared revenue or school aids or highway aids or whatever. And so when people start saying, well, why doesn't the governor just take a Med-Ex to this budget, well, somebody's gonna be left holding and it's gonna be people who are in nursing homes. It's gonna be people who are on the city council or on the school board. We're gonna have to make up the difference. And how do you want your poison? Do you want it on the property tax or do you want it shared from income tax and sales tax which has a broader constituency that pays into it? I know there, I always run into people who would say, oh, the best taxes are always local. I'd say, well, well, look at the fact that today we're a global economy. Maybe it's better to tax companies that do business all over the world. They share the cost of paying the Wisconsin tax with people in France and China and everywhere else. The economy of scale for them is such that it's better for them to be able to spread the pain around. And so why should you put all the owners on the little old lady owns a home and put it on the property tax if you can away capture sales tax revenue from tourists and others who come to this state? As an aside, do you think whatever, ever consider a toll road in Wisconsin has, I'm sure that's been raised many times and I don't know what the discussion has been on it. Well, the discussion that has been in the past has been the federal government precluded the establishment of toll roads on roads that were built with federal monies. In other words, when I-43 is built or whatever I-94, I-90, and you wanted to retrofit them and now collect the toll, the fed said, hey, wait a minute, we paid 75% to build this or whatever, therefore you cannot charge a toll. If you look at the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the Illinois Turnpikes and so on, those are all built solely by the state and- I did not know that. I did not know that. And the monies that were garnered to pay the cost of the maintenance and construction. Oh, interesting. Federal policy has changed, I don't know, but that was the argument in the past and the state generally, when we had the argument in the past and people would suggest that, it was that if we were to embark upon this, it would be more expensive and more of an inconvenience and a pain because you have to have limited access and those type of things. It's better to take the 75% federal dollars, build the road and have as many accesses in entrances as you can for businesses and communities. There was just better public policy to go that route. But now you're seeing with obviously so many of these roads getting to the end of their life expectancy, there is more and more talk about even privatizing roads. I think Illinois has privatized part of the tollway and there are a number of states that are doing this. It remains to be seen what the long haul will be on this because obviously these companies aren't there to be benevolent, they're there to make a profit and how long they can sustain tolls that are reasonable. I don't know, I haven't been to Illinois for a while but for years it was only 40 cents when the state ran the toll roads. I guess it's- It's a whole lot more now. It's a whole lot more, I know it is. But that's because there's a whole no player in there who doesn't subsidize this in some way. Interesting. Well, one of the other things that's happening in the budget negotiations that I think has a number of people pretty steamed up and I think with some cause is to fold the verification of the Great Lakes Compact into the budget process which seems to me to be terrible public policy. I mean, I can be as upset as I wanna be that the assembly is not allowing the Great Lakes Compact to move forward but fold that into the budget bill. Well, the budget bill- Get it passed, that's the goal, right? In the state of Wisconsin, you have one of the most restrictive relating clauses in bills that you'll find anywhere. In Congress, you can put a battleship on an education bill. Wisconsin, you cannot. But the relating clause in the start of a bill proposed laws, that's what is very, very strict. And there are people, there are amendments that do come in and people in the assembly get up and say, Mr. Speaker, I raised the Germanus issue and the speaker rules on the relating clause in the first paragraph and says, yeah, you're carpooling amendment or whatever it is, is non-Germain. Ruled, not appropriate. The budget bill, however, if you read the relating first paragraph of the budget bill is, this is state government and we finance everything and everything is germane. So you can put anything because everything costs money, whether it's printing paper or hiring staff or whatever it would happen to be. It is the only bill that is germane that put anything that you wanna get done quickly into. And so that's why sometimes at three o'clock in the morning on the last day of the budget, you have all these legislators throwing these things in because they know that this train is leaving the station and you wanna put your bags on it because no other train is coming along because you've got the germane this issue. I didn't know that specific fact either. So this has been a worthwhile show. It stinks as far as watching lawmaking. It's like watching sausage. You shouldn't do it, but it is a bill that creates an opportunity for the governor and others to put things and get things done. The governor really wants this greatly compact and the legislature is out of regular session. The only thing that's left is a special session with three bills. You can't put the compact on the campaign refinance bill. So what do you do? The only other bill that you can tie it with in some way is the budget bill. So that's what he's doing. And that happened fairly often in your tenure. It's just, this seems to be a fairly important public policy issue that you'd like to hold up. But of course it's not gonna get passed then. Unless there seems to be some movement forward, which there unfortunately does not seem to be so, but interesting. Well, the Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court came down with an interesting case, an interesting decision right at the end of April, relating to the Indiana voter ID case, a 6-3 vote, and a win for Indiana, which has one of the most restrictive policies in the US in terms of requiring a picture ID, a state-issued picture ID in order to vote. So you come to the voting poll with your picture ID. My understanding from the articles that I've read, there are only two states that are that restrictive, Indiana and... I don't, I'd be guessing. There's 25 of the 50 states that have some sort of state-issued document that you need to vote. But Indiana and two other states actually have a photo ID. So really, I mean, as far as I can tell, any state can do anything at this point. And I mean, I don't think we're quite back to the poll tax yet for two literacy exams, but you can really require a pretty picture. It was an odd decision. I mean, the media's talking 6-3, but in reality it was, and it was 6-3, but it was 3-3-3. The court, there were six justices that got to the same conclusion. Three used one type of logic and that was Justice Scalia and Aliotto and Justice Thomas, of course, has got Scalia that goes so goes Thomas. And those three pretty much said the states can pass almost any law they want, as long as it applies to all of its citizens equally. And if it works out that it disadvantages some citizens, well, life's tough in the aluminum siding business. The other three, led by Justice Stevens, they were the ones who wrote, well, Stevens wrote the opinion. And it really, it doesn't solve the situation for much longer because it was a very curious, that opinion was very curiously written. It said that, well, first of all, you didn't really show the court that there was a problem. You know, so, you know, we're giving the state of Indiana permission to address a problem that really isn't a problem yet. And that's going to open the door because in that opinion, Stevens at least laid up the possibility that later on, if a state or a group more accurately can show that they have in fact been burdened unfairly because of the parts of the statute that are put into place, those three justices, as long as the three in dissent would probably form a different majority and go the other way. So they're basically telling the states, do pretty much what you want, but we will pretty much expect to see citizens coming back and saying, because of these burdens that were required, you have to go get a birth certificate, you gotta go find time off, you gotta go to your county seat, you gotta pay for that birth certificate, those kinds of things. When they can show that, that's led to a disproportionate number of elderly, African-American, Hispanics, young people on not being able to vote, the court may just change its mind on it. You know, what is interesting, Justice Breyer in dissent pointed out the cost of getting a birth certificate is actually more expensive than the poll tax that the court struck down 40 years ago, even adjusting for inflation. And I think what you're gonna see end up happening is it'll be back in court fairly soon, certainly after this next presidential election. It is true and typically in a court case, judges are much happier if they have people who have standing and standing means that you're affected by the problem and to deal with lofty issues that don't have concrete people with concrete situations attached to them is usually something that a court won't do. And so the fact that they even accepted the case, the US Supreme Court only has, doesn't have to accept any cases really and it certainly is very picky about the cases it does choose. It could have just said this is not ripe for adjudication because no one's, I mean, we assumed that there were going to be problems, I certainly assume there will be problems, but you're right, the decision said you really haven't laid that out for us strongly enough and those are the kinds of decisions lawyers like because they're less global, they're less universal than Scalia at all and it does leave the door open. And you can get a US Supreme or even a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision where you do craft together a majority, but they're six different opinions and so you read through all six and you say, well, what is the state of the law? What is going on here? And it can sometimes be very difficult. Lawyers like that, because it leaves that little tiny little crack that you can kind of try to drive your truck through at some point in the future. Essentially the decision said is the state has an interest in maintaining the integrity of elections. As long until we see some evidence that particular groups of citizens have been unfairly burdened by such regulations the state may make, that's where we are. And so it'll be, yeah, they'll be back. It'll be back after the presidential election because you're gonna get a chance to look at a lot of high voter turnout and you'll get a chance to look at the demographics and then the six, my absence of the three will probably be more amenable to taking a look at it then. You'll see it again. Yeah. I think it's a way to organize disenfranchised groups. I mean, you can say let's go get our picture IDs, and then you can vote. I mean, it's an organizing tool. Well, yeah, I thought that's a great organizing tool. I think it's a plus. So I get to always say- Of course when that happens. Always say to the Republicans old. Always say to be careful what you wish for. So you've got the Republican legislature past the ID law and a lot of partisan bickering, but no evidence and that's basically what they, so they got- And there's no evidence on either side. No, on either side. So the state can legislate. Yeah. Well, it's a classic. And be careful what you wish for because it may be very well a campaign or an organizing kind of tool and come back to bite them. And it's just one of those classic solutions in search of a problem. And you just see that so often. I mean, the school district, school board was one of my complaints. So we say this is a great solution, but no one has yet to be able to articulate for me what the problem is that we're trying to solve here. And when people really get down to it, there's no problem or it hasn't ripened into a problem. There's a problem in the sense that it's with conservatives who don't like at the poll registration. They want to make it so that you can't go down the black neighborhood with a bullhorn and say, all right, today we want you all to get down there and vote. And all you have to do is bring your utility bill or whatever and you'll get all these people go around the block lined up to vote. One way to eliminate that completely and the onsite voter registration is by putting in these laws that say you've got to have a certain ID with your picture on it and you got to go through certain machinations in order to comply with this law. It's going to preclude onsite registrations, going to preclude whipping up people to vote, people who normally don't vote. So you're really disenfranchising a group and you're cutting out a campaign technique or an election day technique that is used in some states. And interestingly enough, absentee voters, at least in Wisconsin, under the proposed law don't have to go down to the courthouse or to the, I'm sorry, to the clerk's office to pick up their absentee ballot and show a picture ID. Well, there wouldn't have to do that. So the folks who are going to Florida and so forth, but in any event, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think it'd be fair to say though in the state of Wisconsin with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic governor, there's no real chance of a voter ID unless it's attached to a budget bill of some sort or another. Well, the senator from this district has been a perennial introducer of the photo ID. And if you remember the news conference that I had, the chairman of the committee to which that bill was referred had been walking, was walking by the news conference and started making some comments and saying this bill is dead, it's not gonna, and I think the senator said something to why don't you have a hearing on my bill and let it out and he basically said, cause I don't agree with it. I'm in power. Yeah, exactly. And when you're in power, you will have to agree. That's right, that's why those majorities are nice. Being in power means everybody sits down for four years or two years and is quiet. Yeah, pretty much. Just a couple of other issues that have come up. Steve Kagan, of course, is the new congressman from, which district? Green Bay. Well, it's the Green Bay soon. Yeah, whatever district. Eight district, thank you. Toby Roth, still good. I'm still used to nine districts. Yeah. And John Gard is indicated he's gonna get back in the race. I think, I beg your pardon, I'll be healthy next taping. Your best shot at getting an incumbent, I think is in that very first election cycle after. And what Gard has said is I now have a record that I can hold up and run against. Which, of course, with the two of them together, that really didn't happen. Kagan, on the other hand, is not gonna have to spend probably quite so much of his own money this time. I think he'll stay in. I don't think he's done anything particularly controversial. Well, it depends on whether it coattails. I think it's a presidential year. It's gonna be a big turnout. So it remains to be seen, but you're right. I mean, the eighth district is traditionally pretty Republican, isn't it? Yep. Father Cornell was the last Democrat. And that goes way back. 60s, February. So, I don't feel. What does that say about, I mean, obviously Kagan was a physician. He didn't have a voting record. And he's, you know, Gard's right. You've got now something to hold up and say, he's voted for this, this, this, and this. And this is not what I don't think our district is all about. But if Gard really lost in an open election, there was a lot of money on both sides thrown around in that race. And he lost the first time. I mean, I'm surprised that the Republicans haven't found someone else to run against him. I mean, I know it was very, very close election. Well, and Gard's pretty well known. Yeah, and he had sort of a record that they went after on the state level because he was in state legislature. He's not well, or he was not particularly, Gard was not particularly well liked, it's my understanding. But he was in the legislature a good long time. And he was the speaker. Yes. Yes, so I mean, that's, you know, a fair position of power there. And so it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out. Well, and you know, the Republicans now would like to get back into control because they lost the majority in oh six are saying now, what are the 20 seats that we really have to pour all our money into? And if you look at the margin of victory by Kagan, and you look at the historical voting pattern, first Democrats and Cornell in the 60s, you come to the conclusion, that's where you put your money. You bet. And so there's gonna be a lot of bucks spent by both sides. And I hate to be anybody who watches Green Bay Television because you can speak, you'll be nauseated by the number of ads and probably the meanness of those ads. Yeah, just a minute left. I noted on Wisp politics that Obama's fundraising in the state of Wisconsin far exceeds Clinton's. Either of them, however far exceed John McCain's. I was interested that Obama spent three times what Clinton spent in Pennsylvania, didn't narrow her lead, but it would seem that no matter how much money you throw at something at a certain point, there's the tipping point doesn't happen. A lot of diminishing returns is seen in the Netherlands. Yep. Yeah, so I think that's all pretty interesting. And Weineke says the Democrats are still working hard. They don't need a candidate right now. Who knows, you need our TV show. We hope that you'll come back and join us next time.