Wisconsin's Governor Walker and the possibility of a recall

Pages

OG_slinger wrote:
"Our intent with these changes was to encourage a deliberative process with state agencies in developing policy and legislation," said spokeswoman Laurel Patrick. "This allows for robust debate with state agencies and public employees over the merit of policies and proposed initiatives as they are being formed, while ensuring materials related to final proposals, as well as information related to external stakeholders seeking to influence public policy, would remain fully transparent."

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QOd8rFQ.gif)

So confused since essentially this would have done the exact opposite...it's like the whole Iraqi Army Spokesperson meme all over again.

TheGameguru wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
"Our intent with these changes was to encourage a deliberative process with state agencies in developing policy and legislation," said spokeswoman Laurel Patrick. "This allows for robust debate with state agencies and public employees over the merit of policies and proposed initiatives as they are being formed, while ensuring materials related to final proposals, as well as information related to external stakeholders seeking to influence public policy, would remain fully transparent."

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QOd8rFQ.gif)

So confused since essentially this would have done the exact opposite...it's like the whole Iraqi Army Spokesperson meme all over again.

I'll give the devil's advocate explanation of how this was supposed to be a positive thing:

In this time of severe partisan divide where compromise is a dirty word, having debates and deliberation out in the open will force the different parties (lets be honest, mostly the Republicans) to hamper the debate by always insisting on 100% what they want and never giving an inch. If they are actually productive and useful then soundbites and quotes from that process would cause them to lose their next primary, so the are forced to be enormous assholes to defend against that.

If, on the other hand, this sort of stuff was secret, then they could actually be productive, reasonable adult human beings, and get something done by working together across party lines, without producing evidence of that reasonableness that would hurt them in the next election cycle.

Note that I think that it's a bad idea. I think that it's attacking the symptom, not the problem, and doing so in a way that will help foster even worse problems later on. But for anyone wondering what possible justification there could be for such a statement, that's what it is.

If you'll recall, just prior to the government shutdown there was a bipartisan "super committee" that was deliberating in secret to try to make a plan that both parties could agree to. The justification for that being secret was exactly the same. The Republicans could theoretically propose tax increases, the Democrats could theoretically propose service cuts, and no one would know at the end what individual people had agreed to what parts of the proposal, and then the finger pointing could be spread around everyone involved instead of more singularly.

Disappointing, but not a surprise - Wisconsin's State Supreme Court orders an end to the second John Doe investigation, looking into illegal coordination between Governor Walker's campaign and third-party political groups.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court today ordered a special state prosecutor to shut down a controversial investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s political fundraising and “permanently destroy” all the evidence they have collected, handing Walker a huge political victory just days after he formally announced his run for president.

“To be clear, this conclusion ends the… investigation because the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote in a majority opinion effectively ending the so-called “John Doe” probe into Walker’s fundraising.

The sweeping nature of the ruling, by a sharply divided court– in which four conservative justices sided with Walker and two liberals with the state prosecutor–pulls the plug on a three-year probe that threatened to expose new details about millions of dollars in secret contributions the Wisconsin governor personally solicited from wealthy donors to defend his record during a bitter 2012 recall election.

But the ruling seems unlikely to end the political controversy spurred by the probe, which had become a lightning rod in the broader debate over the role of so-called “dark money” in American politics. Critics immediately noted that two of the justices on the court who ruled in Walker’s favor had been elected with $10 million in contributions from outside advocacy groups, which don’t disclose their donors and which were the very subjects of the Walker investigation.

I'm not a lawyer, but don't see grounds for prosecutors appealing to federal courts for a reversal of this ruling (even though the majority opinions cite First-amendment issues, which would seem like it might open the door to federal jurisdiction).

Frankly, that just convinces me of Walker's guilt.

If something can be done about Walker, please let Gov. Branstad be taken with him.

Meanwhile, newly-unsealed audio from the John Doe investigation's raid on Cindy Archer's house directly contradict almost all of her claims about how those interactions happened that morning.

Cindy Archer, a longtime aide to Gov. Scott Walker, has described a 2011 police raid on her home in which officers screamed at her, threw a search warrant at her without reading it, barred her from stepping outside to smoke and failed to inform her of her constitutional rights.

Newly unsealed audio of the three-hour incident tells a different story.

That recording details tense but mannerly exchanges between Archer and Aaron Weiss, an investigator with the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office, as he led a team of officers during an early morning raid on Archer's home as part of a now infamous John Doe probe.

"I'm sort of doing you a courtesy by letting you get a coffee and smoke a cigarette just because I imagine being woken up at six in the morning by a bunch of people in black suits is not the way you want to wake up in the day," Weiss said at one point.

"Thank you," Archer responds.

One of Scott Walker's staff lied? Who could have seen that coming?

A bill to exempt political crimes from John Doe investigations has now passed the Wisconsin Assembly.

A state Assembly committee voted on party lines Thursday to advance a bill that would alter the scope and implementation of John Doe investigations in Wisconsin. Prosecutors have used John Doe provisions to investigate Gov. Scott Walker's campaign twice.

The bill would limit the scope of crimes that can be investigated in a John Doe probe to the most severe felonies and some violent crimes, meaning campaign finance and ethics violations could no longer be subject to a John Doe.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

A bill to exempt political crimes from John Doe investigations has now passed the Wisconsin Assembly.

A state Assembly committee voted on party lines Thursday to advance a bill that would alter the scope and implementation of John Doe investigations in Wisconsin. Prosecutors have used John Doe provisions to investigate Gov. Scott Walker's campaign twice.

The bill would limit the scope of crimes that can be investigated in a John Doe probe to the most severe felonies and some violent crimes, meaning campaign finance and ethics violations could no longer be subject to a John Doe.

The idea that any group would actually vote to make it harder to expose political corruption and they somehow survive that process by appealing to the voters on the "likability" of a single targeted politician (in this case, Walker) is still completely staggering to me.

[quote="Demosthenes"]

Dimmerswitch wrote:

A bill to exempt political crimes from John Doe investigations has now passed the Wisconsin Assembly.

A state Assembly committee voted on party lines Thursday to advance a bill that would alter the scope and implementation of John Doe investigations in Wisconsin. Prosecutors have used John Doe provisions to investigate Gov. Scott Walker's campaign twice.

The bill would limit the scope of crimes that can be investigated in a John Doe probe to the most severe felonies and some violent crimes, meaning campaign finance and ethics violations could no longer be subject to a John Doe.[/quote

The idea that any group would actually vote to make it harder to expose political corruption and they somehow survive that process by appealing to the voters on the "likability" of a single targeted politician (in this case, Walker) is still completely staggering to me.

IOKIYAR

So when you have a statewide conspiracy what are your options? Appealing to the federal courts? I'm not sure where their jurisdiction would come in though if elected officials are all choosing to ignore the laws that they created.

When Andrew Jackson was faced with South Carolina threatening to nullify Federal tariffs (and laws) it deemed not in its interests, he asked Congress to authorize military action. He was a big fan of South Carolina, but valued the Union more, and he said that he'd go with the troops, and once he crossed the border, he'd hang the first insurrectionist he saw, and continue on as long as necessary.

The South Carolinians backed down before the use of force was authorized, but Jackson felt that the whole crisis was contrived, and predicted that the next big disunion crisis would be over... slavery.

(Traditionally, the Army and National Guard are called out in cases where the State authorities are resisting Federal obligations. It has happened a number of times, including the Civil War and several small insurrection attempts.)

I have several co-workers, if not friends, predicting a civil war in the near future. I can only imagine what would happen if Obama threatened Wisconsin with the military. Especially with the governor up for President.

The Guardian has published a scathing assessment of Scott Walker - "When you're as bad at campaigns as Scott Walker, you should just give up".

Donald Trump’s existence in the race actually seems to be goading Walker into looking worse, when you’d think that The Donald’s hogging all the attention might have helped Walker avoid embarrassing revelations. After all, Walker’s political record basically involves refusing to tell anyone what his plans are and then doing something politically craven: he first campaigned on fixing Wisconsin’s budget, then once elected decided that it was public-sector unions’ fault and used a short-term crisis as an excuse to gut them; he evaded discussion about potential anti-union “right-to-work” legislation by calling it a distraction, then signed a right-to-work bill; he ducked questions about legislating more abortion restrictions, then signed a 20-week abortion ban.

And that doesn’t even get into the hail of convictions and indictments in his administration and the campaign finance investigation that suddenly stopped thanks to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices who received donations from many of the same groups being investigated.

Nice to see our Governor's shenanigans getting more mainstream coverage, even if none of the revelations in that piece will be news to regular readers of our various Wisconsin threads.

I'm surprised at how awfully he's campaigning right now. It seemed to me that playing The Game was the only thing he actually excelled at, mostly thanks to lacking any kind of conscience.

Maybe it's like moving from (American) college football to the pros? Sure, he could game the system REALLY well at the state level, but now he's up against competition that's been doing the same thing as him for years and can react faster on top of it.

And mind you a state the size of Wisconsin. It makes you wonder how much he'd get away with in CA or NY.

Jolly Bill wrote:

Maybe it's like moving from (American) college football to the pros? Sure, he could game the system REALLY well at the state level, but now he's up against competition that's been doing the same thing as him for years and can react faster on top of it.

Even when you draw as much attention as Walker did, a lot of people just plain don't pay much attention to state-level politics. Some of the things you can get away with in a statehouse look laughably amateurish when the whole world is paying attention.

To me, Walker has always seemed to be a guy with a whole lot of ambition, a lack of scruples (probably inspired by the certainty that God/Reagan was guiding him), and not a lot of natural intelligence. You can go pretty far with that combination; it turns out that critical thinking can be a bit of a hindrance in politics. You just can't go as far as Walker wants.

In today's NYT: The Revenge of Scott Walker

Thoughts, Dimmerswitch? And the contrast with this really resonates with me right now:

Robinson: I think that in our earlier history—the Gettysburg Address or something—there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.
(from President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II)

concentric wrote:

In today's NYT: The Revenge of Scott Walker

Thoughts, Dimmerswitch? And the contrast with this really resonates with me right now:

Robinson: I think that in our earlier history—the Gettysburg Address or something—there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.
(from President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II)

The idea that any elected official could vote for a bill that makes them unable to be investigated for multiple corruption crimes makes me wonder how the entire population doesn't rise up and ask them what the hell they're doing.

concentric wrote:

In today's NYT: The Revenge of Scott Walker

Thoughts, Dimmerswitch?

Thanks for posting this - I hadn't made the time to write a post with adequate context, but this was definitely on my list of things I wanted to share with P&C.

I think this excerpt from the New York Times sums it up pretty well:

Mr. Walker has been a target of two John Doe investigations in recent years. The first, which looked into misconduct by his aides or associates while he served as Milwaukee county executive, led to six convictions. The second involved allegations of illegally coordinated fund-raising between Mr. Walker’s campaign for governor and conservative political groups. In July, a deeply split Wisconsin Supreme Court — several of whose justices were backed by the same groups in their election campaigns — shut down the investigation, adopting an unprecedented reading of the state’s campaign-finance laws to find no problem with the activities in question. Mr. Walker was not charged in either case.

I noted my concerns with our State Supreme Court colluding with the Walker administration years ago - the intervening time has only underscored the risks involved when the Judicial branch abrogates its responsibility as an impartial arbiter of the law in favor of nakedly partisan alliance with the Executive branch.

Pages