The Capital Times, May 1
The beclowning of Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald
It is no secret that Scott Walker played the fool in what were generously referred to as “negotiations” with Foxconn, the multinational corporation that reached a sweetheart deal with the former governor in 2017. Walker locked Wisconsin taxpayers into a semi-permanent relationship with a controversial company that has been plagued by news reports about how it has treated workers poorly, harmed the environment, and failed to follow through on agreements.
That was a bad start. Then things got worse. Despite Walker’s cheerleading, a steady stream of leaks and revelations raised questions about the soundness of the deal. And it became abundantly clear, even to those who continued to defend the arrangement, that inflated expectations were being altered and abandoned.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek recently referred to “Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,” reporting: “A huge tax break was supposed to create a manufacturing paradise, but interviews with 49 people familiar with the project depict a chaotic operation unlikely to ever employ 13,000 workers.” A Business Insider article on Foxconn’s arrangement with Wisconsin concluded that “evidence is mounting it’s a terrible deal.” The business-friendly magazine Reason has referred to the deal as a “boondoggle.” Last fall, Fortune magazine headlined an article: “In Wisconsin, Some Fear Foxconn Factory’s Main Product Is Smoke and Mirrors.” A February headline in another business journal, Forbes, read: “Foxconn Fiasco Proves Manufacturing Revival Won’t Happen Without Accountability.”
Amid the reports of mounting costs and declining commitments, the debate about whether Walker failed Wisconsin was settled. He did. And the mess he made of things contributed to his defeat for re-election in 2018.
Walker is gone. But his failure continues to haunt Wisconsin.
In part, this is because the former governor did not screw up on his own.
Walker had help from the legislative leaders who were supposed to check and balance the former governor’s rank ineptitude. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a popcorn salesman from western Racine County, and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, a career politician from rural Dodge County, like to portray themselves as fiscally conservative Republicans. But they gave away the store, gleefully placing their rubber stamps on Walker’s crony capitalist commitment to provide Foxconn with as much as $3 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies in return for the company’s over-the-top promise to create as many as 13,000 jobs. Estimates of the cost to taxpayers rapidly rose, even as signals regarding actual job creation grew mixed.
No one in their right mind imagined that Walker, a desperate political climber who was trying to save his job after a failed presidential bid, knew what he was doing. But Vos and Fitzgerald were supposed to bring some small measure of accountability to the process. That didn’t happen. The Republican legislators were being paid to represent the taxpayers of Wisconsin, but they chose instead to represent Foxconn.
They are still doing so - to the embarrassment of themselves and the state.
Gov. Tony Evers, the man who beat Walker and who now must clean up the messes made by his bumbling predecessor, announced in mid-April that he would work with Foxconn to revise the troubled deal. This was a responsible and necessary move. Yet, in shoot-first, aim-later fashion, Fitzgerald and Vos immediately attacked Evers.
The Senate leader charged that “the governor has wanted to undermine the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. from day one” and claimed ominously that any move to “renege” on Walker’s commitment to Foxconn would cost the state its credibility with corporate interests.
Vos dismissed talk of renegotiation of the bad deal as “naive” and told 1130 WISN radio that Evers was “clearly above his pay grade on some of these decisions.” The Assembly leader charged that the governor does “not understand the full ramifications of the words that he says and the actions he is trying to take with his administration.”
“It is beyond my level of understanding to think a governor of the state of Wisconsin is basically rooting for the failure of the largest economic development project in the state’s history,” said Vos, who announced on April 17 that the Foxconn deal was “ironclad.”
The next day, April 18, Foxconn officials let it be known that they were “open to further consultation, collaboration and new ideas” in their deliberations with the Evers administration and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
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Janesville Press Gazette, May 4
E-Verify works. Trump should be touting it
President Trump had the crowd roaring at his rally in Green Bay last month over his jabs at Democrats for opposing his immigration agenda. He proclaimed how quickly the immigration system could be fixed if only Democrats joined his side.
“I used to say in 45 minutes. It’s really 15 minutes. It’s so simple, but we need Democrats to vote on it. Otherwise we can’t change it,” Trump said.
But all the Democratic support in Congress won’t do much good if Trump himself isn’t promoting effective policies. In particular, it makes little sense for Trump to rail against illegal immigration but then fail to enlist in his fight one of most powerful weapons in the government’s arsenal for deterring illegal immigration, the federal database known as E-Verify.
Many employers use this online network to confirm employees’ work status, but its use isn’t mandatory except for in a handful of states. Trump should demand Congress take action to require all employers use E-Verify in all 50 states_no exceptions.
Trump mentioned E-Verify during his campaign but has been mostly silent on the issue since becoming president, obsessing instead about building a southern border wall. A wall, however, wouldn’t eliminate one of the driving forces of illegal immigration: employment opportunities. E-Verify would help do that by flagging employment applicants who try to get jobs with fake identities and documents.
A 2017 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas study examined states that require all employers to use E-Verify. It found those states had fewer illegal immigrants living and working there after E-Verify requirements took effect.
After Arizona passed an E-Verify mandate in 2008, the number of illegal immigrants working and living in Arizona fell 33 percent and 28 percent below projections, respectively.
In Alabama, the number of illegal immigrants working there fell 57 percent below projections, while the number living there fell 10 percent.
Mississippi experienced the most dramatic declines: The number of illegal immigrants working and living there dropped 83 percent and 70 percent below projections, respectively.
Of course, these illegal immigrants didn’t necessarily leave the country. They could have easily moved to a state without an E-Verify requirement. That’s why a federal E-Verify mandate is necessary, so workers can’t escape to Wisconsin and other states with loose employment standards. Implementing a federal E-Verify mandate would be relatively easy_a word Trump likes_because the online infrastructure already exists, and maintaining it is much cheaper than building a border wall.
To be sure, E-Verify alone won’t stop illegal immigration, and an E-Verify mandate should be coupled with reforms to allow industries that rely on illegal labor to hire more legal workers.
The Gazette Editorial Board asked Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Janesville, last month for his thoughts on passing a federal E-Verify mandate, and he indicated support but said he didn’t know why Congress has so far failed to take up the issue. He’s a freshman, and so we’re willing to give him time to begin advocating for an E-Verify mandate. But we hope conversations about illegal immigration begin to evolve beyond Trump’s wall obsession.
Congress should think beyond physical barriers and more broadly about why people risk coming the U.S. illegally. So long as Congress continues to tolerate employers hiring illegal immigrants, illegal immigration will remain a problem, wall or no wall.
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The Journal Times of Racine, May 6
State’s government bodies shouldn’t circumvent the open meetings law
Wisconsin’s open meetings law exists to ensure that government business, the people’s business, is conducted where the people can watch it happening. The exceptions to it, the instances where a governmental body can act in closed session, are generally limited to contract negotiations and personnel matters. That is as it should be.
As fierce advocates for the concept of “government in sunshine,” we were dismayed recently to read of the Madison School Board tiptoeing awfully close to the line between lawful and unlawful government meetings.
Individually or in pairs, Madison School Board members spend hours each year in private “board briefings” with Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, discussing matters soon to come before the full board for votes that must be held in public, the Wisconsin State Journal reported on April 29.
Cheatham instituted the briefings after she was hired in 2013, and district administrators and some board members defend the practice.
Under state law, school boards and other local public bodies must have a quorum - typically a majority or more - of members to take official action, and the action they take must occur in publicly noticed meetings.
“Walking quorums,” by contrast, are a “series of gatherings among separate groups of members of a governmental body, each less than quorum size, who agree, tacitly or explicitly, to act uniformly in sufficient number to reach a quorum,” according to the attorney general’s office.
They’re illegal because they can “render the publicly held meeting a mere formality,” according to the office.
TJ Mertz, a board member until he lost a re-election bid last month, didn’t recall administrators asking board members specifically how they planned to vote in an open meeting, but “I do recall myself and other board members giving feedback that indicated how you would vote on something.”
Mary Burke, a seven-year veteran of the board and its outgoing president, said her experience in the briefings is that members don’t individually agree to act in a uniform way in later meetings of the full board.
That hardly matters, Ms. Burke. The possibility exists that enough of these small-group meetings could be held to reach a quorum tacitly. The individual board members might not indicate how they will vote in the “board briefings,” but the superintendent can tally indications of support or disapproval in her or his head through a succession of such meetings, enabling the superintendent to get a feel for whether an initiative has majority support on the board, meaning the deliberations will have taken place in private instead of in public.
Even if this practice does not violate the letter of the open meetings law, it certainly has the odor of not abiding by the spirit of the law.
Madison’s board briefings raise similar questions as those addressed by the attorney general’s Office of Open Government in a case involving the Green Bay city council. An alderman there asked the office if a mayor can “hold separate meetings with each of the 12 members of the city council to tout an upcoming agenda of his,” address questions and take up other issues “in a closed-door meeting.”
While Assistant Attorney General Sarah K. Larson cautioned in a March 5 letter that “if the mayor meets with the council members in one-on-one situations for the purpose of exercising the responsibilities, authority, power or duties delegated to or vested in the body, a court may find a prohibited walking quorum” if the members had discussed city business and “have agreed with each other to act in some uniform fashion.”
Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders said the practice in Madison and in the Green Bay case “may not clearly violate the law, but it probably should be avoided, so as to not undercut the purpose of the open meetings law, which is to ensure that the deliberative process is public.”
New Madison School Board member Ali Muldrow told the State Journal that if board members were to cover all the ground covered in private briefings in public meetings, “that would be like a 7-hour meeting.”
If the length of Madison School Board meetings is the concern, then the board should start its meetings earlier in the day.
Government meetings - that would include meetings between members of a school district board, however many, and that district’s superintendent - should take place in public, in the open. Government bodies should avoid even the appearance of an effort to circumvent the open meetings law.
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