DEI Isn’t Worth the Fight

Earlier this week I wrote that Republicans’ rejection of a much needed UW Madison engineering building expansion said all you need to know about the state of that party. It’s no longer the party of business, jobs and the economy. It’s now the party of culture war pettiness.

Yesterday, Gov. Tony Evers made an unintended but similar indictment against his own party when he threatened to veto the entire budget over Speaker Robin Vos’ threat to cut $32 million from the UW System budget. The $32 million is Vos’ estimate of what the system spends on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, but since he can’t actually target them directly the cut amounts to a penalty for even having them.

Evers was right when he said yesterday, “To cut, at this point in time, the University of Wisconsin System when we have a $7 billion surplus is irrational.” He should have stopped there. But then he issued his veto threat.

Really? He’d veto the budget over this? He didn’t veto the first budget of his tenure when Vos stripped everything out of his proposal and sent him a wholly Republican document. He didn’t veto the second budget of his term when Vos did it again and this time included a massive tax cut aimed at the rich. In both those budgets Vos and the Republicans included none of Evers’ priorities. He was able to use his line item veto authority to make modest improvements from his point of view, but he got nothing he wanted. They were Republican budgets.

But this time he’s got a budget where he actually has gained some ground. There will be big increases for K-12 schools and for local governments. (Technically, those increases are in a separate bill, but it’s all part of the budget process and it’s the budget bill that actually provides the funds.) This little dust up over DEI is not that big a deal and certainly doesn’t justify a veto threat. Better to do what we proposed here yesterday: a compromise that would not cut the UW budget but would create a Legislative Audit Bureau study into the UW’s DEI programs to learn more about what they really cost, what they really do and what their record of accomplishment has actually been.

Evers’ over the top threat says a lot about the state of the Democratic Party, where identity politics has taken over among the party’s elites. (But not among the party rank and file which is far more practical and moderate, not to mention also a majority of the party faithful.) The Democrats used to be the party of the working class. Now, it’s the party of the Middlebury College faculty lounge.

And imagine what would happen if Vos went through with this cut and Evers made good on his threat. Where do you think the public would line up over a veto of an entire budget over DEI programs at the UW? My guess is that they’d be about 75% with Vos on that one.

This is all just stupid. Vos is playing the culture wars card, over-reacting to a real problem but one that he doesn’t know enough about. Evers is now batting the ball back across the net because it turns out he’s playing the same game. The vast majority of the public doesn’t care and would side with Vos if forced to.

This whole DEI debate says more about the sad state of both political parties than it does about DEI.