I Want the Dems to Win… Why Again?

As Wisconsin’s two-year legislative session raced to a close this month the Democrats had some leverage. They didn’t use it well.

The Republicans still control both houses, but by much narrower margins since fair maps went into effect for the last election. The GOP runs the Senate, but by a thin 18-15 margin. That means that they can allow only two Republican senators to defect on any given bill. Otherwise they need Democratic votes to get a bill across the finish line.

That situation became even more acute last week because the Assembly had already gone home. Any bill that didn’t pass the Senate last week would be dead and even an amendment would essentially kill a bill because the Assembly was no longer around to vote on the amended legislation.

So, if Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu wanted a bill to pass and he didn’t have the support of three or more senators in his own caucus he had to work with Democrats. And that’s what gave minority Democrats leverage.

To illustrate how I believe Democrats squandered their chance, let me highlight two bills on which LeMahieu won that game and one on which he didn’t even try to win.

The first bill is Assembly Bill 1034. This was awful legislation both in terms of its substance and in terms of the process. The bill gives the UW Athletic Department $14.6 million a year in state taxpayer dollars, ostensibly to pay off debt, but even the department admits that they really want the money to pay players under the new name, image and likeness rules.

As I pointed out at length in a previous post, while I’m a strong supporter of paying the players, this bill is a bad idea because it’s the first time that taxpayers are funding what had been a self-supported sports program and because it allows the Athletic Department to go on with its profligate spending. For example, they’re paying losing football coach Luke Fickell $8 million a year with automatic $100,000 annual pay raises regardless of performance. Even worse, it would cost them about $20 million to buy out his contract if they were to fire him after this season. They also moved ahead with a new $285 million football practice facility while knowing full well that they’d have to come up with $20.5 million to pay players. I guess they just figured taxpayers would pick up the slack.

AB 1034 also exempts NIL contracts from the state’s open records law. So, just when taxpayers have more reason than ever to know what this public university’s Athletic Department was up to, the bill throws a cloak over that information. And maybe the very worst part of the bill is that it specifically says that the players are not university employees — never mind that they are now essentially being at least partially paid by the taxpayers.

As for the process, this bill was introduced only weeks before the session ended, it was rushed through committees in both houses, and pushed to the floor for a vote in the Assembly where it passed 95-1 without debate. That one vote was from a Republican, Dan Knodl, who correctly pointed out that this was only the start and that taxpayers would be on the hook for more in years to come.

When the bill reached the Senate, no less than seven Republicans opposed it. But it was a priority for LeMahieu, the bill’s Senate sponsor. So, now with only 11 votes for it in his caucus he had to reach out to Democrats. Everyone knew that LeMahieu wouldn’t bring it to the floor unless he had found the votes. Sure enough, AB 1034 was the last bill to come up and, sure enough, he had the votes.

In fact, the initial vote was 16-17 against the bill. But then Democratic Sen. Dora Drake of Milwaukee switched her vote. Based on a decade of work as a legislative aide and a career in politics, it’s clear to me that Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein of Middleton, who voted for the bill herself, assured LeMahieu that she’d come up with the votes he needed from her caucus. To me it’s obvious that she and Drake agreed beforehand that Drake would be the deciding vote if needed.

To bring even further shame on the Democrats, I’m told by a reliable source that Gov. Tony Evers agreed to sign the bill even before it was introduced. The fix was in from the start. The UW has to beg for every nickel for actual education, but when the Athletic Department wanted a handout the Democrats were quick to join in greasing the skids. Pretty damn disappointing.

One final note before I move on. After three decades, the UW is shutting down Space Place, a fun interactive learning center for astronomy, popular for school outings. I don’t know what its budget is, but with only two employees you can bet it’s a fraction of Fickell’s salary. Imagine if a bill had been introduced to save Space Place. What do you think would have happened?

The second bill is Assembly Bill 601. This bill would allow sports wagers placed on mobile devices anywhere in Wisconsin, but only if the servers processing those bets are located on federally recognized tribal lands. In other words, it gives the tribes a monopoly on those bets. That’s why it was opposed by big corporations, like FanDuel.

But it was also opposed by those concerned with gambling addictions and by the majority of Wisconsinites. Democratic Sen. Chris Larson of Milwaukee said it best: “Until we have in place some protections to make sure that people are not falling down a black hole of despair, placing one bad bet in front of the other, I do think that it is a good time to pause.”

A strong majority of Wisconsinites agree. In a recent Marquette Law School poll, 64% of them were against allowing online sports betting.

And several Republican legislators also opposed the bill for this reason and, I suppose less legitimately, because corporations like FanDuel didn’t like it.

In any event, once again LeMahieu didn’t have the votes and yet again Hesselbein came to his rescue. In this case LeMahieu had only nine votes in his caucus, but 12 Democrats joined them and the bill passed 21-12. But at least in this case, Evers has reservations about it and is debating whether or not to sign the bill.

This brings us to the sad tale of Assembly Bill 315. That’s a Republican bill which would have extended the state’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program. Stewardship supports land acquisition, habitat restoration and property development for public lands. The program is set to expire on June 30. This bill would have extended it for four years at an annual authorization of $28 million, down a bit from the current $33 million. It also would have shifted the focus from buying land to habitat restoration and property development — more campsites and paved bike trails, for example.

It seemed like the best deal environmentalists were going to get out of the Republicans, but most environmental groups and Democratic legislators opposed it for reasons I find hard to fathom. I agree that there should be more money in the program and that more should be available for land acquisition, but why not take this now and work to improve it next year?

AB 315 passed the Assembly and was waiting to be scheduled in the Senate. And yet again, there weren’t enough votes in the Republican caucus to pass it because some of those senators wanted to kill the program altogether. And the Senate Democrats helped them do just that. They stubbornly refused to offer any help in passing this, admittedly inadequate but still reasonable, legislation.

It made no sense, except that they apparently thought they’d gain some partisan advantage in the fall elections. They won’t. The program is popular but nobody will win or lose an election because of it. The Democrats played politics with conservation and conservation lost.

Emily Wood, executive director of the Door County Land Trust had the right idea when she told the Wisconsin Examiner in December: “We really just need to keep it alive because funding it in a later year, or coming back and making changes to make it better are way more possible if it’s an existing program. But coming up with another one from scratch, it just seems like it would be an impossibility. So right now, it does feel like we are just screaming to keep it, just keep it alive. Just don’t kill it.”

But the Democrats did participate in killing it. Now the program will expire this summer and there will be nothing instead of the $28 million that was on offer. As Lyndon Johnson liked to say, those who won’t accept half a loaf have never been hungry.

So, let’s sum up. The Democrats used what leverage they had to give UW sports almost $15 million in taxpayer money while keeping the public in the dark about how that will be spent and specifically saying that athletes aren’t employees — making it harder for them to form a union. Then they used that leverage to expand gambling when two-thirds of Wisconsinites recognize gambling’s corrosive effects on society and families. And finally, they failed to use their leverage to keep the popular Stewardship Fund alive.

I still want the Democrats to take back the majority in the Senate — and also the Assembly, though that would be a stretch — but with leadership like this I sometimes wonder why.

A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.