In baseball, you focus on getting out the batter who is running to first base. You ignore the guy who is sliding into home.
For Wisconsin Democrats, Gov. Scott Walker is the player running for home.
On a national level, it is a smart idea to connect Walker to the recent attempt to spay and neuter Wisconsin’s open records laws in a last-minute budget provision. Painting Walker as the anti-sunshine governor is a good move for Democrats and the other Republican presidential candidates.
Here in Wisconsin, it is a waste of time to put the blame for the open records debacle on Walker. No matter how the presidential campaign shakes out, Walker probably won’t run for a third term in 2018.
Instead, Democrats should keep the focus of this scandal on two guys who are running for first base. Two current members of the state Legislature will likely run for higher office in 2018: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau). If Walker’s out, we will have an open election for governor that year. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin will be running for reelection in a midterm, the sort of election that favors Republicans in this state.
Those big chairs have to be tempting for Vos and Fitzgerald. Sure, they’d have to give up their current legislative offices, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for either man. Even if they lose, they’ll have lucrative lobbying careers.
Vos and Fitzgerald are two of the most prominent Republicans in the state. That doesn’t guarantee they would win their party’s nomination. Rep. Sean Duffy might want try his hand at a statewide race. Plus, it seems that every Republican primary features at least one Johnson/Hovde-style rich guy who wants to try to buy a senate seat. But no matter the competition, the two legislative leaders would enter as contenders.
That is why it is important to tie these attempted open records changes to Vos and Fitzgerald. The documents collected by the Wisconsin State Journal — through an open records request — show that both of them signed off on these changes. Both of them agreed to bury the changes in a catch-all provision of the state budget released around the July 4 weekend. Vos is even listed as the person who requested the language.
Three years is a long time. It will be up to Democrats to make open records an issue in 2018. Sunshine laws are an important topic, one that cuts across party lines. There are few matters that aren’t dramatically polarizing in Wisconsin, and Democrats got handed this one on a platter. Legislative Republicans have tried to spin this as an attempt to protect constituent identities. But that spin has fallen flat on its face, mostly because the normally reliable echo chamber of conservative talk radio is as dependent on open records requests as the liberal media.
Make this an issue in 2018 and even conservative editorial boards will think twice before endorsing either legislative leader. Why would any newspaper endorse the very leaders who tried to take away one of their newsroom’s most powerful tools?
Democrats should also remind voters that legislative Republicans wouldn’t even admit who pushed for the open records language until the State Journal forced them to acknowledge their complicity. That’s not just bad leadership, that’s an absence of leadership.
