River News: Our View

If you want to see how a big government that is totally unleashed and unhinged behaves, shattering all decent boundaries in the quest for domination by the administrative state, there’s no better place to see the show than right here in good old Wisconsin.

Over the past year, and especially after regressive liberals (we refuse any longer to characterize the left as “progressive” because it is the antithesis of progressive) captured the state Supreme Court, big government in the Badger state has become almost as big and glamorous as Taylor Swift. 

Big government is so “in” in Wisconsin these days that Gov. Tony Evers and justice Janet Protasiewicz might well end up being be opening acts at a Swift concert. If the gig doesn’t go to Biden, of course.

Just like that, the Democratic-bought Supreme Court majority (the Democratic Party paid $10 million for it) has determined that the state’s redistricting maps were rigged by the legislature, you know, after a legitimate Supreme Court upheld them last year. Just like that, through regressive interpretation, a Dane County judge determined that Wisconsin’s pre-Civil War abortion ban didn’t really mean to ban abortions.

Now, just like that, the regressives are headed to a friendly court to put an end, once and for all, to the antics of elected legislators taking action to block the policy agendas of unelected bureaucrats. What audacity to believe legislative intent trumps bureaucratic intent, the Democrats say, with true disdain for conservatives who believe in the will of the people.

To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, How dare they!

Think about that one. The Democrats and their regressive allies are actually arguing that the elected legislature, which represents the will of the people, has no right to meddle in the affairs of the administrative state. If the administration get its way — and why wouldn’t it? — what the bureaucrats say, goes.

Now one of the things that upset the bureaucrats was the Joint Finance Committee’s move last year to block state funding of the massive Pelican River Forest easement. What were legislators thinking, so brazenly interfering in the decisions of environmental experts?!

(Cue Greta): How dare they! 

Never mind that 67 percent of the land in Oneida County, 86 percent of the land in Langlade County, and 91 percent in Forest County is already non-taxable or has a reduced tax base. Never mind that the proposal would swallow up the vast majority of the town of Monico.

Never mind that the purchase affected the counties’ abilities to comply with their own comprehensive land-use plans, and to pay for roads and emergency services. Never mind that northern Wisconsin is starved for economic development and economic diversification, both of which depend on developable land. 

Never mind all that. The bureaucracy has spoken.

And so, in a surprise announcement in his State of the State address, Gov. Tony Evers announced that magically he had secured other funding to replace needed state funding to complete the purchase.

We say magically because it is kind of vague just how all the financing will work. We’ve heard something about a bridge loan, perhaps as in the state of Wisconsin has a bridge it would like to sell us. We’re not sure because Democrats don’t like to talk about back-room things like that.

Of course, it should come as no surprise, since the Evers administration is going to court to shut up those pesky legislators whom the people elected, that the federal and state bureaucracies never complied with any statutory responsibility to coordinate the easement purchase with local governments, including those most impacted — the town of Monico and Oneida County.

As we report in today’s edition, the governing statute of the Forest Legacy Program, the National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) all require the federal government to coordinate its land use activities and decisions with local governments.

To cite just one criteria, the FLPMA mandates that federal agencies “shall provide for meaningful public involvement of state and local government officials, both elected and appointed, in the development of land use programs, land use regulations, and land use decisions for public lands, including early public notice of proposed decisions which may have a significant impact on non-Federal lands.”

Of course, the Forest Service is hemming and hawing, jawing and cawing that it really did coordinate, and we’ll give them that coordination is a somewhat vague term that is not defined in the statutes and can be interpreted in many ways.

But, in this case, the Forest Service can only claim they coordinated with local officials in Wisconsin if coordination can be interpreted to mean no contact whatsoever. Because that’s the contact they had with our local officials.

Somehow, we don’t think the administrative state is going to be able to get that one by the courts. It’s a slam dunk, and we agree with Rep. Tiffany that Oneida, Forest and Langlade counties should retain legal counsel to sue to have the deal overturned.

The bottom line is, the Forest Service did not carry out its statutory requirements, and, as such, the easement purchase should be declared null and void.

The only caveat we have is that, in seeking legal counsel, Oneida County should unanimously vote to hire respectable outside counsel with a reputation for defending property rights. The other thing is to make sure that county corporation counsel Mike Fugle stays as far away from the case as is humanly possible.

If that guy touches the case, the entire county could end up under an easement. Get a restraining order to keep Fugle away, if necessary.

To be sure, there is little case law on coordination specifically, and no precedent that we know of. But what we do know is that the Forest Service, in releasing these funds, has violated not just the spirt of the federal statutes, but their plain black-and-white language. There is plenty of case law and plenty of precedent about that.

All of which takes us back to the Evers’ administration’s absurd lawsuit seeking to strip away the constitutional powers of the elected state legislature and to force them to surrender their authority to bureaucrats hell-bent on subverting legislative intent. 

Frivolous though the lawsuit is — and we will be writing more about this — it could succeed anyway because frivolous and ideological and hack are the signature characteristics of the new state Supreme Court majority, whose sole goal is to give left-wing regressives and their bureaucratic allies everything they want. They want not to uphold the rule of law but to impose the law of rule, as written in bureaucratic beehives.

It is interesting in a time in which, on the federal level, the Supreme Court is poised to strike down flawed case law that requires courts to defer to administrative agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of law, even when the agencies are party to the lawsuit being contested, that we  could be headed in the opposite direction in Wisconsin.

That is to say, if the state Supreme Court goes wacky again, as it appears inclined to do — why else take up the suit, which they did on a 4-3 vote —the administrative state in Wisconsin will be all powerful, and the people’s actual voice ever more diluted.

The bureaucrats in Wisconsin will not hesitate to have their will and way, as they did during the  years of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.

The people have ways to fight back, and one way — besides a new governor and electing Republican Brad Schimel to the high court next spring — is to pursue and win a coordination lawsuit that guarantees due process for local governments in their land-use battles with state and federal agencies.

In that context, a lawsuit by our three northern counties is more important than just the easement in the Pelican River Forest. That’s crucial, too, but it would be part of a larger fight against the hegemony of the bureaucratic state. 

We can’t afford not to recognize the larger battle that needs to be fought. We can’t afford not to see the forest for the trees, for while it is the Pelican River forest and northern Wisconsin they seek to take today, it’s ultimately every aspect of our lives they want. 

We can’t afford not to see the dangers of an all-powerful administrative state, even when it’s wrapped up in the pretty bow of a conservation easement.