David Michael Miller
It was back in June 2016 that Scott Walker sold his Wauwatosa home and became the first Wisconsin executive in memory to move full-time into the governor’s mansion, the baronial 16,000-square-foot home on Lake Mendota with 34 rooms, 13 bathrooms and 10 manicured gardens. Such luxurious living could begin to give you kingly thoughts, which might help explain Walker’s surprisingly tone-deaf stand on special elections.
The governor refused to call for interim elections after two Republican lawmakers, Sen. Frank Lasee of De Pere and Rep. Keith Ripp of Lodi, took jobs in his administration in late December. This meant these districts would have no representation for more than a year, until January 7, 2019, when new legislators elected in November would take office. The citizens in these districts would thus pay a year’s worth of state sales taxes, income taxes and other fees, but have no political representation. As any American can recall from grade school history, this is taxation without representation.
Walker was treating the 175,000 citizens of these two districts much like the aggrieved American colonists who fought a revolution. Indeed, you might argue the withholding of rights by Gov. Walker is in some ways worse than that of King George III.
The reality for the colonists is they had local governments that made many decisions, but needed to suffer the occasional imposition of a stamp tax or a tax on tea by their distant overlord Great Britain. The residents of these two Wisconsin districts, however, were losing any say over all state government decisions over a one-year period. Walker and the Legislature debated during this time a host of issues, from gun control to a sales tax holiday, from health care reinsurance to closing Lincoln Hills school for boys.
After the courts ruled Walker was breaking the law’s plain language by resisting special elections, the governor pushed Republican legislators to reconvene and pass a bill allowing districts to be unrepresented for more than a year. This would have left those 175,000 citizens with no representatives to argue on their behalf as the Legislature curtailed their rights. I’m not sure even King George would have dared go so far.
And what, I wonder, would George and his Parliament have made of a ruler who goes to the courts, as Walker did, to ask a judge to not enforce the current law and instead wait for some future one to be passed? As Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess put it: “No court that I’m aware of is at liberty to ignore the law in order to facilitate the Legislature’s consideration of bills that might become law.”
He was the second judge to heap scorn on the governor, but like King George after the decisive battle of Yorktown, Walker refused to abandon a lost cause and took his case to the state appeals court in Waukesha, one of America’s most Republican counties, where he was rebuffed yet again.
Insiders in both parties knew why Walker opposed these special elections: He feared that Democrats, who have been winning such elections across the nation, would prevail yet again. But Walker instead insisted repeatedly that his sole goal was to prevent an “unnecessary waste” of taxpayers’ money. In fact, the governor had ample time to call the special elections and add them to the normal February primary and April general elections; that would have incurred “no additional cost,” says Reid Magney, public information officer for the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Instead, Walker must now hold elections off the normal calendar. To estimate their cost, Magney noted the last election held in the now vacant 1st Senate District cost $234,876, while the cost for the now-vacant 42nd Assembly District was $71,730. That’s a total of $306,000. Magney, however, notes a special election won’t be as costly because the turnout will be lower. But even if the cost is roughly $200,000, that’s still a lot.
And that’s not the entire bill, because a team of lawyers had to represent the governor in cases before two different Dane County judges and then before the District 2 Court of Appeals. At what cost to taxpayers? I contacted the offices of Gov. Walker and Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who assigned Assistant Attorney General Steven Kilpatrick to defend the governor, and neither office would reveal how many lawyers worked on this case or what the total cost was.
Nor is that the total bill. Had the Legislature, as Walker urged, held a special session, taxpayers would have had to pay “per diem” costs of $184 per day to any legislator outside Dane County. Just one day of legislating to curtail the people’s right to vote would have cost around $20,000.
Walker, in short, was willing to charge taxpayers whatever it took to usurp their right to representation, while offering the flimsiest excuse. As Appeals Court Judge Paul F. Reilly put it: “Representative government and the election of our representatives are never ‘unnecessary,’” and “never a ‘waste of taxpayer resources.’”
Or as the colonist James Otis declared, “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee
