Email date: 3/11/08
In this update:
1. Popular bills running into a brick wall
2. Newsweek’s ’Court Watch’ series starts with Wisconsin
3. Corporate directors back disclosure of political spending
As the last scheduled floor period for regular legislative business this year winds down, the Legislature is proving incapable of dealing with many big issues like health care, climate change and the state Supreme Court’s independence. But lawmakers are showing themselves to be equally incapable of solving a long list of smaller problems too.
There are always differences of opinion on every issue. But it’s our elected representatives’ job to work through those differences and come up with solutions that are best for the whole state. The current crop of legislators have been a dismal failure in this regard.
None of us can stop working for the year on March 13. But our elected representatives think they can. That’s why the People’s Legislature will be rallying at the Capitol on Thursday. We’ll get started at 11 a.m. in the GAR Hearing Room (417 North).
We’ll be hearing from lead advocates on a number of bills with broad public support that are being stonewalled by the Legislature. Among the groups joining us for the People’s Legislature rally will be the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, the Coalition for Wisconsin Health, Smokefree Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group.
Hope to see you there - along with a friend or two or three.
Newsweek is starting a series the magazine is calling "Court Watch." The first installment is about Wisconsin. Not a pretty picture.
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce has fought tooth and nail against disclosure of the group’s electioneering and WMC’s allies in the state Assembly have bottled up legislation that would let the light shine in. But WMC isn’t in step with the folks who inhabit the corporate boardrooms, according to a new survey by the Center for Political Accountability. Of all the corporate board directors surveyed, 88% of them favor public disclosure of their corporations’ political activity. Indeed, most of them didn’t know that corporations and trade associations are not required to disclose all of their political spending.