River News: Our View

This Tuesday, Wisconsin voters have a chance to help re-calibrate government toward a true separation of powers, in which the three branches of government hold unique divisions of authority, and they can do so by voting ‘yes’ on the two constitutional questions they will see on their ballots.

If the amendments pass, the state will have taken a big step toward restoring — or at least beginning to restore — the legislature’s rightful powers. 

It might be a good time to say up front that the Founders never envisioned three co-equal branches of government. That’s a myth. Each has distinct powers that ensure checks and balances, but for the Founders the legislature was superior. One might say that the three branches were designed to be equal, with one branch more equal than the others — a qualified legislative supremacy.

That is no longer the case, not on the federal level and not in Wisconsin. In fact, the opposite is true. The executive branches of government on the federal and state levels are so gargantuan and powerful as to make their supremacy these days obvious.

Every once in a while legislatures try to claw back some of their power, and that’s why we have two proposed constitutional amendments on Tuesday’s ballot.

The two questions are both related to financial appropriations, as the story in today’s edition describes. One would prevent the legislature from delegating its core appropriations power and the other would specifically require power-sharing between the governor and the legislature when federal dollars come our way.

Again, as the story points out, that power sharing does not exist today. The governor decides how and when federal dollars will be spent. That’s what happened with billions of dollars in federal Covid relief aid, and, as the Badger Institute points out, the state is still sitting on more than $1 billion of that aid, with no legislative input on how to spend those “emergency” funds.

You can’t get more unaccountable than that. As former Gov. Tommy Thompson points out, “our elected representatives are closest and most responsive to the voters. And, they know and understand — they respond and advocate — for the unique needs of their local communities.”

That’s why, of all the branches of government, the Founders viewed the legislative as the most central to the success of the republic. Because it is closest to the people, that’s where the purse strings are held, in theory, and that’s where the laws of the land are initiated.

In a successful democratic republic, the judiciary doesn’t get to make law or appropriate funds. The executive branch doesn’t get to make laws or appropriate funds. That’s the people’s job, to set the policies of the government they own and to fund it through their elected representatives.

Unfortunately for decades now, especially in Wisconsin state government, that role of the legislature has been supplanted by an ever more powerful governor and an ever more powerful state bureaucracy, the latter of which has almost become a separate branch of government. Together the governor and the bureaucracy are twins marching in lockstep in the service of unchecked power. 

For some time, the absolute concentration of power in the executive was blunted by the election of a Republican governor, and, for a while, by a conservative Supreme Court wedded to the foundations of the constitution.

Even then, though, the power of the bureaucracy was hardly checked. Due deference, passive administrative rule review, a special-interest civil service system that protects partisan ideologues — all these and more have erected a bureaucracy that has run rogue in the state with almost dictatorial powers. 

With the governor as a partner — especially with his complete freedom to dole out funds — the bureaucracy and its progressive allies have become even stronger.

In recent years, Republicans have made some strides in taking their constitutional powers back. Among other things, while Walker was governor, Republicans placed important restraints on the DNR’s threats to private property. The REINS Act, which gave the legislature more active control over administrative rules, was passed.

Most of these reforms have been too little, too late, and, now that a progressive mob has taken over the state Supreme Court, we see bureaucratic power and state control over daily life increasing by the day. Witness the recent Egg Harbor Supreme Court ruling that — by concluding that a sidewalk is not a pedestrian walkway — allows the state to take private land through eminent domain.

The overall picture isn’t pretty, in other words. At the end of the day, as we have said time and again, elections have consequences, and the only real resolution to the constitutional crisis that we have — an unchecked and rogue political court combined with an unchecked and rogue bureaucracy partnering with a willing governor — is for voters to boot those progressive anti-democrats out of power. 

Until that happens, voters can enact constitutional amendments that begin to return rightful power to the legislature, and that is what these amendments do, modestly. 

Naturally, progressives are screaming about giving the people’s elected representatives any say in how the state spends money. That should tell voters all they need to know right there.

But progressives are also screaming about Republicans bypassing the poor, poor governor though the constitutional amendment process, which they say is an abuse of a system that should be rarely used and even then only for core constitutional questions.

Two points about that. One is that deciding who gets to spend billions of dollars — just one executive official, or that executive official with the consent of lawmakers constitutionally tasked with appropriating public money — should have an obvious answer: the people, through their elected representatives. Nothing says “core” issue more than how we spend our tax dollars.

The second point is, the progressive argument is pure hypocrisy because the Democrats, led by Evers, only recently tried to get an amendment passed that would have allowed voters to propose constitutional amendments by petition, triggering a binding referendum. 

It didn’t pass but it would have allowed special interests with already organized constituencies to propose all sorts of leftist amendments and head straight to low-turnout elections, cutting out the legislature altogether.

Such a measure would undercut representative democracy and open to the door to momentary voter passions, something the Founders wanted to avoid because voting on the whims of the moment almost always leads to buyer’s remorse, not to mention terrible and even dangerous policy. 

An endless string of constitutional amendments would have assaulted the electorate if the governor had had his way. Talk about an abuse of the constitutional amendment process.

Tuesday’s vote, on the other hand, is the result of cool deliberations and multiple hearings through two sessions of the legislature, with an opportunity for the voters to say yes or no. They are also modest proposals that really do nothing more than underscore the legislature’s rightful role in appropriations.

For better control of our tax dollars, not to mention for a more balanced government that respects the will of the people, voters should vote yes Tuesday on the two constitutional amendments.