Contact:
Todd A. Berry
608.241.9789 or wistax@wistax.org
April 15, 2009
[Editor’s Note:
Guest Commentary, 583 words]
Burying
Controversy in Budget Compromises Citizens’ Voice
Todd A. Berry,
President, Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance
For the past 55 years, the state’s only high school text on state
and local government has assured young people that “Wisconsin’s
lawmaking process gives a citizen many opportunities to observe and
participate.” Have we been
lying to them all this time?
The text—published by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers
Alliance (WISTAX)—summarizes the state lawmaking process this way:
bill introduction in the first house; referral to a standing
committee; public hearings; committee action; floor debate and passage;
consideration by the legislature’s other house, where the process is
repeated; and, finally, action by the governor.
The problem with this standard “civics” explanation is that it
might not apply to Wisconsin this year.
The reason is that much statutory change is not
considered as separate legislation. Rather,
it is folded into the state’s two-year budget, where important proposals
are never referred to legislative standing committees, never scrutinized
through the regular hearing process and, in some cases, never even
discussed.
The governor’s 2009-11 budget bill (AB 75) now before the
legislature’s 16-member Joint Committee on Finance (JCF) contains scores
of changes that have little to do with state finances.
These include a state smoking ban, faculty unionization rights,
numerous insurance mandates that increase costs to both insurers and
consumers, domestic partner rights and benefits, repeal of the state’s
limit on school compensation growth, and a host of state criminal law
changes that span over 80 budget-bill sections. The list goes on . . . and on.
Sadly, this is not an entirely new development.
Since the late ‘60s, the biennial budget has evolved from a
fiscal bill of several hundred pages to an omnibus one that can exceed
2,000. One indicator of this
trend is the number of “non-fiscal policy” items found in budgets by
the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB).
Since 1993, that figure has averaged 83, and ranged from 21 to 150.
More than 15 years ago, budget experts warned that Wisconsin’s
“policy-in-the-budget” practice was impairing not only state
budgeting, but the very basis of representative democracy—lawmaking.
In March 1993, LFB Director Bob Lang told lawmakers that the
legislative process suffered when policy issues were included in the
budget. The following month,
legislative leaders of both parties agreed to reform the process, removing
110 non-fiscal items from Gov. Tommy Thompson’s (R) 1993-95 budget.
The practice of excising most non-fiscal proposals from budgets has
continued ever since. The LFB recently offered a list of 80 “non-fiscal items”
that could be removed from the budget bill and reintroduced as separate
legislation. However, the JFC
cochairs decided to leave in the budget 40 of those items, including all
of those mentioned above.
Don’t get me wrong. Many
of these proposals, such as faculty bargaining, domestic partner benefits,
and a smoking ban, deserve honest, open discussion by both rank-and-file
legislators and citizens. Whether
they merit enactment or not I leave for others to decide.
But the place for that open discussion is in public hearings,
standing committees, and open floor debate.
The decision by state political leaders, both executive and
legislative, to bypass the lawmaking process and “bury” controversial
statutory changes in the budget circumvents the promise of representative
democracy that we—and those before us—make to our children.
My predecessor at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance wrote at the
time of the 1993 reforms: “The
new process will stick only if it has the continuous strong support of
legislative leaders of both houses and the governor.”
Seventeen years later, we see how prescient he was.
