Questions. The Republican Party of Wisconsin and its dark-money minions have "questions" about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, questions which they are only too happy to raise in their campaign advertising designed to promote by proxy controversial Gov. Scott Walker, who faces the voters in just three weeks.
But the conservative inquisition -- is, as we explored here a few days ago, Burke really a "plagiarist"? -- remains mostly context-free and self-serving. Indeed, in one particular legal case the conservative stance already effectively has been undermined in another case by the contrary ruling of Federal Judge Rudolph Randa, himself a conservative. In these contrary cases, conservatives collectively are acting like Two Face, that famous Batman villain from the comics. In short: It's OK If You're A Republican, but not if you're anybody else.
We'll get to Randa and his latest silliness in a moment. First, let's deal with the other GOP and GOP-friendly hypocrites.
Inquiring Wisconsin conservatives want to know -- or at least want voters to think -- there are things that might in vague, non-substantive ways possibly seem scandalous about Burke, if, that is, you only listen to their own, sly and high-speed phrasings in 15-or 30-second radio and TV ad bursts, along with Internet ads such as those popping up en masse for Wisconsin DNS addressees on Internet sites like this one.
One of those conservative, non-question questions turns out to portray Democratic Party candidate Burke in a very good light and Republicans not at all brightly. The issue involved Burke's service on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board. Earlier this year she voted with a board majority to accept proposed 2015-'16 contract agreements with the district's teachers union.
The terms of the Madison school deal exceeded what was allowed under the nationally infamous Wisconsin Act 10, the Walker measure that basically gutted collective bargaining for most public employees in the state. For instance, the Madison labor agreement doesn't force teachers to contribute to their health insurance premiums, and continues the once common practice of collecting mandatory union dues from teachers through automatic dues deductions from payroll. What?! You could almost hear conservative heads exploding.
Take-no-prisoner Republicans pounced on the contract approval, saying it violated Act 10. And that's where Burke's courage showed up. Knowing full well she'd be in a campaign battle against Walker, and that her vote in favor of new contracts likely would be attacked, she went ahead and voted yes anyway.
Walker signed Act 10 into law in 2011. Although existing public-employee labor contracts across Wisconsin remained in effect, for all practical purposes they could not be replaced when they expired. However, the Madison teachers quickly challenged the law and in 2012 won a favorable preliminary ruling from a Dane County circuit court judge who also imposed an injunction against the law pending further court action.
The state immediately appealed, but until the injunction and anti-Act 10 ruling were overturned this year by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Madison teachers technically were not covered by the law's tight limits and were free to re-open contract negotiations. That was the view of no less an authority than James Scott, chairman of the Walker-appointed Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
Burke's vote for the new teacher contract wasn't just because of the injunction's window of opportunity, or just because on principle she opposes Act 10 and its negative impacts, but also because, as she has since argued, the negotiated deal was a win-win-win for pupils, teachers and taxpayers.
School district officials say the district has achieved cost savings by working collaboratively with represented employees in ways that would be harder if not impossible under Act 10, which basically orders public administrators to make unilateral decisions and refuse to deal with organized labor in any meaningful way. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
In short, Burke's vote was an affirmation of the truth that Act 10 is not only bad for organized labor, but bad for the state's school children and taxpayers, too. Because of Act 10, the Madison metro schools contract is the last remaining collective bargaining agreement among the state's 424 public school districts. But if the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has its way, that last contract, too, will be declared illegal, null and void. That's potentially thanks to the Milwaukee-based institute's bull-headed lawsuit against the Madison district, 80 miles to its west. The still-pending lawsuit claims the district's deal with the teachers was illegal because Act 10 prohibited such collective bargaining. But what about the injunction? Injunctions? We don't need no steenkin' injunctions.
So -- and this is key to our Two Faced discussion -- conservatives on this matter ask you to believe it's illegal to take advantage of an injunction's window of opportunity to skirt a law. And yet, over in another corner of conservative Wisconsin, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa has just taken the exact opposite point of view.
Read on past the squiggle of orange blackboard chalk for the full monty.
Randa is the increasingly obvious ideologue who a few weeks back made yet another of his patented, entirely partisan rulings from the bench in an effort to summarily quash Wisconsin's on-going John Doe inquiry into apparent campaign finance violations involving Wisconsin's (ahem!) conservative governor. Randa, you may recall, not only ordered the Doe inquiry halted before it could be completed, but also ordered prosecutors overseeing the inquiry to destroy all evidence they'd already collected in the case.
Those orders soon were overturned by a federal appeals court that, in its own written ruling, pointedly spanked Randa's over-reach in the case. And boy, does he have one big over-reach.
On Tuesday, the tireless Randa -- as usual agreeing with conservative plaintiffs -- tried another approach, summarily barring state election officials and the selectively-sued Milwaukee County district attorney (a Democrat who is only one of several DAs from both parties involved in the case) from enforcing strong Wisconsin campaign finance laws that limit collaboration between Wisconsin candidates for public office and supposedly political action groups.
This, like the earlier case heard by Randa, is an effort by targets of the Doe inquiry to make duly appointed agents of justice simply go away. It's sort of like a bank robbery suspect arguing in court that cops have no right to investigate him because that might impinge on his rights as a citizen, including his rights to associate freely and free speech. Never mind that he has been associating with other suspected bank robbers, who like him are hiding their books while proclaiming their collective right to say whatever they like and launder their money however they like. Bizarre reasoning, but there you are.
Randa's new ruling was especially egregious because he only heard arguments from the conservative plaintiffs and not the defendants. That's because the defendant Milwaukee DA (a Democrat, remember) was, ah, inconveniently denied legal representation by Wisconsin's Republican attorney general, who for some odd reason just couldn't bring himself to defend a fellow prosecutor, who happens to be a Democrat. Wouldn't be prudent, at this juncture.
After that denial, the Milwaukee DA used state law to seek private legal representation. That request had to be fulfilled (are you ready?) by Gov. Walker's office, which for unexplained reasons was slow to hire private defense counsel within Randa's short-fuse deadline. Ah, how thickly the wheels of justice are greased when well-heeled conservative interests are out for a spin.
Unless once again reversed by a higher court, Randa's latest ruling effectively would permit candidates to work closely with largely secretive political groups that can collect dark money in untold amounts, and do everything else except explicitly tell people how to vote. You can call 'em evil scum, but you can't tell folks not to vote for evil scum. Seems like a difference without a distinction. Evidence made public by an open records filing in the Doe probe suggests strongly that the Walker campaign has been doing precisely that kind of coordination, on up to direct coordination by Walker himself.
Jeremy Levinson, a campaign finance attorney who has represented Democrats, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Randa's decision was extraordinary because of its swift and imbalanced arrival and because "it really guts much of the campaign finance system in Wisconsin."
Randa issued a preliminary injunction barring the Milwaukee DA and Wisconsin's duly authorized Government Accountability Board [a nonpartisan agency which state Republicans are now talking about replacing with a partisan board] from pursuing their regulation and legal oversight of state campaign finance law.
Never mind that, under Wisconsin state law, the Doe investigation is a proper means of determining if in fact campaign collaboration in this case is illegal. Randa in effect is again trying to short-stop the inquiry by making a summary declaration that nothing in the case involves illegal acts. He's thus effectively ruling against fact-finding, before fact-finding could even be concluded. It's like putting blinders on the police. Who needs facts, when declarations are so much more efficient and speedy?
Then, to justify his fast and sweeping action, Randa wrote in his ruling that it was important to act quickly, because the election is only three weeks away. Isn't that on the conservatives who filed their lawsuit so late? Should a special interest group get rewarded for its legal tardiness, even while the Milwaukee County DA effectively is punished for failure to meet an impossibly short filing deadline? Well, that's not so surprising, if you have seen how conservatives in Wisconsin have been trying to jam Voter ID into action in the eleventh hour before the upcoming and critically important statewide election.
So, here's the juxtaposition of conservative belief that would quash a probe into candidate Scott Walker's campaign tactics yet, on the same basis, permit over-the-top enforcement of Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union law:
* When the Madison school board openly uses the opportunity of an injunction against Act 10 to bargain collectively, why, that's outrageous and illegal, especially since the Democratic candidate for governor was in on the process.
* But when Federal Judge Randa imposes that same kind of injunction, giving conservative campaign groups and Gov. Scott Walker's team a similar legal window to continue acting as they prefer, and in secret, that's all well and perfectly reasonable.
More important, some of the very same conservative groups are involved in both legal cases, and are wearing Two Face. Someone call Batman, quick, because Wisconsin's turning into a place that's just as dark, corrupt and menacing as Gotham.
3:23 PM PT: Wisconsin progressive blogger Rock Netroots just posted an interesting corollary to my own blog post: "The double irony here is many conservatives, in their convoluted effort to pretend like Walker did not break the law, have claimed that the law Randa has now suspended doesn't prohibit issue advocacy coordination, yet they sued to have the law from being enforced." See: http://rocknetroots.blogspot.com/...