David Michael Miller
Last week, under the leadership of Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate voted to remove from office the state’s Elections Commission administrator, Michael Haas, and its Ethics Commission administrator, Brian Bell.
So what did they do wrong? Incredibly, Fitzgerald does not have an answer. “I have no idea,” Fitzgerald told his fellow senators. “It’s not a question of guilt. It’s a question of comfort” on the part of the Republican senators. By that standard any state official can have her or his reputation ruined and job snatched away, as long as Fitzgerald and the gang feel like it. If that seems outrageous, it is merely the beginning of a truly ugly story.
Fitzgerald, after all, was among the Republican leaders who scrapped the state Government Accountability Board, whose board members were retired judges, at least half of whom had Republican backgrounds; but Fitzgerald and other GOP legislators accused them of somehow running an anti-Republican agency.
So it was goodbye GAB and hello to a new state Elections Commission and Ethics Commission, each with an even number of Republican and Democratic appointees on their boards. They faced the difficult task of getting a majority to agree on what policies to follow, and from all accounts did this well.
Notably, both commissions voted unanimously in favor of the appointment of their first administrators, Michael Haas and Brian Bell, and both choices won the trust of board members of both parties with the job they did.
But in December, the hyper-partisan Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel released a report on the long disbanded John Doe probe of the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker and conservative advocacy groups. The report was supposed to discover and prosecute whoever leaked information from the probe to the media, but failed. Instead, the angry, error-filled report made all sorts of accusations against staff of the old Government Accountability Board, which both Haas and Bell worked for. In fact, neither were among the nine people Schimel recklessly (without specifying the evidence) suggested should be investigated for contempt of court. Yet Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said they had concerns that Haas and Bell might be “partisan” administrators and felt they should be removed from their current positions.
The two legislators were met with a stunning rebuke from board members of the bipartisan ethics and elections commissions: both voted unanimously to retain Haas and Bell as administrators.
Haas sent a letter to Vos and Fitzgerald demanding an apology for “trashing my name and reputation,” and received no answer. Bell demanded an investigation of the job he has done, to prove any partisan bias, but received no response from them either. The Elections Commission board unanimously voted in favor of a resolution proposed by GOP appointee Dean Knudson asking Fitzgerald and the Senate to hold a public hearing on whether Haas should be fired. That, too, was ignored.
Instead, without providing any evidence that Haas or Bell were “partisan” or had done their jobs in anything but an exemplary fashion, Fitzgerald and the Senate Republicans (with all Democrats voting no) voted to remove the two administrators. So far, board members of both commissions are somewhat resistant (the Elections Commission voted 4-2 to retain Haas until at least April) and the issue might end up in the courts.
The whole thing seems like an act of mindless vengeance by Fitzgerald, perhaps still fuming about the John Doe probe. As Ann Jacobs, a Democratic member of the Elections Commission, says: “Just because you are mad about something that happened five years ago and he [Haas] didn’t do, you don’t throw out all the improvements by the [Elections] Commission.”
Democrat and Ethics Board chairman David Halbrooks offered the ultimate rebuke of Fitzgerald’s vendetta, comparing it to the Communist witch hunts of Wisconsin’s most infamous U.S. senator: “Sen. Fitzgerald has gone a long way toward cementing his name alongside Joseph McCarthy in this state,” Halbrooks declared.
But maybe Fitzgerald’s decision wasn’t mindless. One Republican tells me the senator was acting at the urging of his political donors, who are still enraged about the Doe probe. And who might they be? The probe was investigating Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. The latter, the state’s most powerful lobbying group and a huge campaign donor to GOP legislators, seems to get its way on any legislation it wants.
This time, what some unnamed GOP donors apparently wanted was vengeance. Punishment for anyone who dared enforce the law against them. It didn’t matter that Haas merely proofed some legal briefs. Or that Bell actually quit the GAB during the Doe probe and took a job elsewhere in state government. Anyone with any connection to the Doe probe, no matter how tenuous, must be punished.
The message resounding through the state Capitol, and blindly enforced by Scott Fitzgerald, is one of sheer fear: Don’t you dare investigate the state’s fat cat donors, or your careers will be ruined.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.
