MADISON, Wis. — In a new opinion piece for Heartland Signal, columnist Dan Shafer argues Republican politicians in Madison working on the state budget are “kicking bipartisanship to the curb” by jettisoning popular proposals from Governor Tony Evers.
Heartland Signal: OPINION: Republicans are removing many popular policies from Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget
By Dan Shafer
Once again, Wisconsin Republicans are kicking bipartisanship to the curb as the state budget makes its way to the state legislature.
As they have with the last two budgets proposed by Gov. Tony Evers, the Republicans in charge of the budget-writing process in Madison are eliminating just about everything the governor proposed. Never mind that he just won re-election by a larger margin than his 2018 election victory. Republicans clearly don’t see that as any kind of message from voters on which direction they’d like the state to go.
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“We recognized right off the bat from the governor’s [budget proposal] document that it was something that was unrealistic, something that we really couldn’t work with,” said Born.
This type of attitude from Wisconsin Republicans has become so commonplace that no one expected anything otherwise. And the results from Evers winning in a Republican-advantage midterm didn’t change their process one bit.
So what they did next was vote to eliminate more than 540 measures from the governor’s budget.
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Over and over again, Wisconsin Republicans ignore the will of the people in Wisconsin. They take these types of actions at the legislative level and it has an effect upstream, as Republicans and Republican-backed candidates have now lost 14 of the last 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin. Their blowout loss in the April election for Wisconsin Supreme Court was a real indication that people are getting fed up with an out-of-control state legislature that has become unaccountable and unresponsive to majority opinions in Wisconsin. Republican leaders in the legislature, like Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, deserve blame from his own party for those losses that continue to mount.
Considering all the losses Republicans continue to take at the statewide level, it is astounding that they continue to toss policies like so many of these that have broad bipartisan support. Perhaps they’ve just been lulled into a state of comfortable complacency in their astonishing lack of bipartisanship.
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Read the full column on Heartland Signal
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