River News: Our View

As we have often said, elections have consequences, and nowhere is that so more than in Wisconsin, where Democrats have been running wild with a radical left-wing policy agenda that Wisconsinites will pay dearly for in years to come.

Nowhere has the running been wilder than in the halls of the state Supreme Court, after progressives captured the majority last year. The agenda of the new majority is so nakedly partisan that the leftist justices might as well throw their robes aside and tattoo their nether regions with the Democratic Party mascot.

That would be an image none of us would want to see, but then so are the rulings they have been handing down. The cloak of their robe is little more than the curtain seen in the Wizard of Oz — it conceals deeply deceitful judges manipulating the levers of justice to attain and maintain brazen power.

In a decision that we recount in today’s edition, the liberal justices once again took a shot at blind justice, ruling that the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee cannot veto specific DNR land acquisitions under the state’s Stewardship program after the legislature has appropriated money for it, so long as the agency’s purchase falls within the very loose parameters the legislature set for the acquisitions.

To allow otherwise would be to infringe upon the agency’s “core” powers and would violate separation of powers, the court determined.

This time, though, there was a twist. The progressive majority was joined by two conservatives, who agreed on the basic question. Only chief justice Annette Ziegler dissented.

With all due respect to Ziegler — who raised an important point we shall address in a minute — the majority got it right this time, though the motive for the progressive majority was once again nakedly partisan. Separation of powers means nothing if we let the legislature intervene on the details of executing and enforcing a law when the executive branch has followed the legislature’s general directives.

That would set the stage for all sorts of mischief, but chiefly this — it allows for the concentration of power in one branch of government. It enables lawmakers to control not only the making of the law but its implementation, thereby opening the door to selective enforcement.

Such a power snatch by the legislature represents the opposite of a more common problem in the modern era, the delegation by the legislature of its powers to state and federal agencies. 

And therein lies the true take-away from this decision. The ruling itself was correct, but the motive for taking the case — an original action bypassing lower courts — was telling. Indeed, the progressives on the Supreme Court took it because they wanted to protect massive land grabs the state Department of Natural Resources is undertaking in northern Wisconsin, especially the taking of 56,000 acres in Oneida County in the Pelican River Forest.

To her credit, in her dissent Ziegler pointed this out, observing that selecting an issue that only impacts the Republican-controlled legislature and the longstanding Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program should raise eyebrows. 

To that point, Ziegler observed that targeting this specific exercise of legislative control over a state agency comes at a time when state and federal bureaucracies have already accrued massive and extraordinary grants of power, and that this would serve to concentrate that power even more.

“If this becomes a singular application of separation of power principles or the non-delegation doctrine, which restrains only the legislative branch, that amounts to aggregation of power which runs counter to fundamental constitutional principles,” she wrote. “The principles the majority applies today must have consistent application, which could have been more even-handedly accomplished by hearing all the issues in due course. Because this sole issue is being decided in a vacuum and on an expedited basis, we are at risk of seeing a selective application of separation of power and non-delegation principles and, ultimately, imbalance between the branches.”

The petitioners effectively asked the court to revitalize separation of powers doctrine but to apply it to the Republican-controlled branch only, Ziegler asserted. 

It must be quickly added, as justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley did in writing the majority opinion, in many instances the legislature has deliberately written laws that include overly broad grants of statutory power—vague implementation-enabling language that allow/require far-reaching agency interpretation — as a way to avoid making tough decisions.

Though Bradley did not articulate it, in many cases politicians do this because they believe the interpretation the agencies will make will align with legislative intent but still be received poorly by the public. They would prefer the public blame the bureaucrats.

More often than not, though, the bureaucracy takes a step too far, and sometimes the abuse is so egregious that the legislature feels it must remedy the abuse of the power it gave the agency.

That’s exactly what happened in this case. The DNR and the Evers administration colluded with environmental originations to use taxpayer dollars to grab 56,000 acres of land here in Oneida County, removing almost all those acres from any economic development opportunity forever.

We’ll have more to say about conservation easements in a later Our View, but suffice it to say here that the agency is driving a land acquisition truck through much-too-general Stewardship purchase parameters in a relentless drive to secure land and conservation easements.

Mostly the targets are in northern Wisconsin, such as the Pelican River Forest easement. This endangers the entire economic future of the region.

Environmentalists will argue that there was no land acquisition in the case of the Pelican River Forest, only an easement, but the real truth is that an easement in perpetuity involving public dollars effectively makes the land public property, tying the hands of future landowners. 

The bottom line is, whoever controls the land use controls the property right, and paper owners of the land have signed their rights away. In the Pelican River Forest, the easement is owned by the DNR, so guess who really owns the property. Forever.

The bottom line is, the Stewardship program was never intended to serve as a tool for the government to gain control of as much as 50 percent of the state—confiscation by any other name. The program has been subverted by radical bureaucrats, and the Legislature was motivated by good intentions to halt the ongoing abuse of power by the administrative state

In the Supreme Court ruling at hand, Ziegler was right to call out the progressive majority’s partisan intentions to block the legislature from interfering with the state’s master plan.

By the same token, however, the decision in and of itself was the proper one constitutionally. So what to do?

Well, for one thing, this should be a wake-up call to lawmakers to quit giving the state bureaucracy broad grants of statutory power in the laws they write and pass, and to do their jobs—write the law with specific criteria and parameters for implementing it.

With respect to the Stewardship Fund, the legislature must now act in the constitutionally appropriate way it is supposed to act. It should pass legislation to foreclose the use of public dollars to purchase more easements. It should prohibit easements in perpetuity, requiring that they be reviewed after 15 years. 

Most important, the legislature must sunset the Stewardship program. The program was always supposed to sunset after 10 years, with acquisitions after that time being considered by the legislature on their merits, case-by case.

That still needs to be done, and it is the only way, especially after this ruling, the legislature can rein in the bureaucratic state. We can imagine the slogan the bureaucracy must chant as it pursues total control of all private property in Wisconsin: “DNR Land, From the River to the Lake!”

It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of terrorism, in other words. Unfortunately, even if the legislature acts to stop this madness, it will be vetoed so long as we have a Democratic governor.

That brings us back to elections having consequences. Obviously they do. The election in November will have consequences, and so will the election for governor in two years. 

Those elections give us the next opportunity to shut down the bureaucratic state. That’s when we can realize our own dreams again. That’s when we can make Wisconsin Great — and Free — Again.

As someone once said, “Fight, Fight, Fight.”