David Michael Miller
One of the things that interests me most about politics is the intersection between principle and practice, between idealism and realism, between the high-minded way that we wish government would work and the sometimes sleazy way in which things actually get accomplished.
My biggest complaint (among many) with my fellow liberals is that they are stubbornly naïve about the ways of politics, and by refusing to embrace the game as it is played, they lose policy debates that they could be winning. An obsession with process over results is a fatal flaw in liberal DNA.
A case in point is the most recent flare-up of the classic Wisconsin debate over putting nonfiscal policy items in the state budget. We have this very same discussion every two years when a state budget is passed. Whoever is aggrieved by something they didn’t like calls for this horrible process to be reformed. In this case, the Democrats held a press conference to denounce the Republican proposals to destroy Wisconsin open records laws that had been just been quietly slipped into (and then loudly pulled out of) the state budget.
They called for what always gets called for: take out all the policy items and refer them to the regular process; make them rise or fall on their own merits in separate bills. Never mind that when the Democrats were in control, they themselves did not do that.
(Full disclosure. In my job as executive director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed I did exactly the same thing. I called for the repeal of the state’s “complete streets” law to be stripped from the budget as a policy item. In doing so I did not find it convenient to mention that the law had been enacted in 2009 as a state budget amendment. Details.)
The Dems should be careful what they wish for. Their argument is absolutely right in principle, while in a practical sense not only will it never happen, but it probably shouldn’t.
That’s because it is likely that Republicans will hold on to at least one house of the Legislature for the next decade or so. Their 63-36 lead in the Assembly is all but locked in by their gerrymandered districts and by liberal settlement patterns (we tend to cluster in blue ghettos) for the next decade or so.
The best bet for any Democratic rebound is to take back the state Senate next year, where three seats would flip the majority, or to win the 2018 governor’s race. But that only gives the Democrats leverage. The Republican Assembly could and would block any separate bills they don’t like, and they won’t like anything the Democrats propose that will roll back any of the far-right policies they’ve enacted.
So, for example, if the Democrats wanted to reinstate tenure and shared governance at the UW, the only way they could do it is to insert it in the budget and then insist it stay in, probably by horse-trading with the Republicans for something else they didn’t like. That’s because the budget is the one bill each session that must pass. This is what makes the budget the gateway for policy that couldn’t get through the process on its own.
So, in other words, the only way for liberals to start to reverse course on some of the policy defeats of the last four years is to use the very same back door, unprincipled, slip-the-policy-into-the-budget sleaziness they now decry.
For me, I would rather have tenure and shared governance enshrined again in state law, I would rather have complete streets restored, I’d rather allow Dane County to hold pipeline companies to higher standards, and on and on — even if it meant compromising my beliefs about how those things should be accomplished.
I’d rather have good results than a perfect process. A good end does, in fact, sometimes justify flawed means.
