Here & Now

Noon Wednesday with guest Dee Hall

Marisa Wojcik:
Welcome to Noon Wednesday. I’m Marisa Wojcik, a multimedia Journalist for Here & Now on Wisconsin Public Television. Today is Halloween and we’re going to talk about a pretty spooky topic. What happens when measures get passed in the legislature, but we don’t get any public input on it? The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has been looking into this and Dee Hall is here from the Center and is going to tell me a little bit about it. Thanks so much for being here.

Dee Hall:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:
First, you talk about final omnibus motions, but they’re also called 999 motions. What are those?

Dee Hall:
At the end of the legislative session there’s usually a motion that tries to tie up all the loose ends. What we found in our story was back in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s, this wrap-up motion was really used for technical fixes. Sometimes it was used for small items $25,000 or less, a place wanted to get a liquor license, a local historical society got a little grant, the small potatoes stuff. And it was a way for both parties to just keep the budget process moving along. What happened in recent years, however, we found and the USA Today Network did an actual study of these 999, these omnibus motions, what we found is they’ve gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more impactful. They’ve included things like really radically curtailing the Wisconsin Freedom of Information laws, the open records law, really curtailing that. It’s included large spending, big policy changes that really there’s been little to no chance in some cases for the public to even know what’s in it. The other thing about these wrap-up motions is the items do not have individual sponsors. So, let’s say you want to get something into the budget, you want to slip it in there and you’re able to do that anonymously through this omnibus wrap-up motion. So, that’s one of the mechanisms we found.

Marisa Wojcik:
And the other mechanism, it’s Halloween and you dubbed it the body snatcher bill. It’s not actually called that, but it morphs into something else and it’s different from the omnibus.

Dee Hall:
Right, so the omnibus motion has to do with the budget. These body snatcher bills, and I admit, we made up the name because we didn’t know what else to call them, so it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a movie in which these creatures take over a person’s body and they look the same. They look exactly the same, except they’re completely different on the inside. So, we thought that was a good metaphor for what happens to some of these bills, which is a bill has a number, and in the case of the one we featured, SB 54, and it had all to do with probation and parole changes. There were groups that were weighing against it. They had been tracking it for a full year and just before it got passed and after all the public hearings are done, it was amended to include a $350 million prison, new prison. No one had talked about a new prison. No one had heard this $350 million, which is a lot of money and there’s been a ton of debate around whether we should incarcerate more people, maybe we should incarcerate fewer. In that case, that was a stand-alone bill. It was not part of the budget. It was not a motion. Well, it was an amendment to an existing bill and then the groups that had already been opposing SB 54 actually mobilized and were able to stop that new prison from being built. But it would’ve been the first prison in 17 years, so it’s a pretty big policy change, a large amount of money and it really was put in there with no public notice or debate.

Marisa Wojcik:
And so this is part of a series about what agency does the public have towards lawmaking and it’s something that the Center has been working on.

Dee Hall:
This was part of my class, an investigative reporting class and we decided to look at what appeared to be undemocratic trends that were accelerating in Wisconsin. We looked at things like voter ID, for example, which although it is wildly popular, it’s also been documented to suppress votes among certain people, people of color for example, elderly people, young people. College students have a hard time navigating the ID process because they live somewhere different from where they lived with their parents. We looked at photo ID. We looked at redistricting in which they use packing and cracking where people get packed into districts where the vote gets diluted because a Democrat or a Republican for sure is going to win. Or they get cracked apart, meaning their political power is diluted by placing them in a bunch of different districts. So, we also looked at other issues like dark money and all of the changes on the national level and on the state level that have now led us to have these campaigns in which sometimes we don’t know who the big players are behind the scenes when it comes to some of these campaigns. So, those are some of the topics we looked at. We also did this story called, “We, The Irrelevant,” which is actually the name of a local group. They formed because they noticed that the legislature was increasingly passing items that appeared to be just vastly very, very unpopular based on the public comments and the public reaction and yet they got passed anyway. So, we looked at all of these and this is our final big installment of that project to look at this particular mechanism that allows a lot of stuff to get passed, even important stuff without much public notice.

Marisa Wojcik:
And the public normally would weigh in, correct?

Dee Hall:
Right, so yes, if you have a stand-alone bill, there are public hearings that the public can go to. There’s a period of time where they can contact their legislators or they can contact people who are on the committee and they can have some input. The difference with what we wrote about this past week was these bills, these changes are sprung on people in a way long after the public hearings are done. The budget is subject to public hearings. They take the proposed budget around the state, they hear from the people, but the people had no chance to know about for example this idea of a multi-million dollar tax cut that was slipped in in the 2013 budget. That’s the thing that we feature at the beginning of this story. It happened at 10:30 at night. The Democrats really didn’t even know it was coming and they were caught off guard. The fiscal estimate was that it was going to cost $130 million a year and this is a budget in which they’ve already slashed education and the budget for other programs and now we know that it cost more than double that per year. So, that’s the difference between a bill that marches through the normal process and a budget that marches through a normal process and then some of these techniques we wrote about in which basically the public gets caught flat-footed and is really unable to have meaningful input.

Marisa Wojcik:
And it’s just never happened before. When I was reading your story, I thought about a story that I heard about the old rules of football and when football was first developing, there were some people that had these crazy ways to get around the rules and they were technically allowed, but they had to evolve in order to deal with these people that were breaking rules, but not breaking rules. So, any mechanisms to stop these mechanisms or would it require legislation?

Dee Hall:
Well, the legislators make their own rules for how they do things. And according to court rulings, they can also break their own rules with really impunity because the rules are only binding on them if they decide they’re binding on them. It’s up to the legislature to decide do we like the way things have been going, is this a fine process, can we stand behind this process or do we want to change it. It’d really be up to them. But I will say, this is not unique to Republicans. It is not unique to Wisconsin. We cited an investigation done by the Kansas City Star into the state of Kansas. 98% of their legislation is submitted anonymously, which I just find mind-boggling. So, you don’t know who’s submitting it or why. You don’t even know the name of the lawmaker who wants this thing to pass. And then Congress is infamous for this, sticking stuff in the budget that has absolutely nothing to do with spending. It has absolutely nothing to do with the budget. It has everything to do with putting in potentially unpopular legislation, making sure it gets passed because they have to pass the budget–

Marisa Wojcik:
Legislation that they maybe tried to pass before.

Dee Hall:
It’s possible.

Marisa Wojcik:
But it didn’t go anywhere.

Dee Hall:
That’s one in which maybe at least people know what the proposal is, maybe there’s been some public hearing. We wrote about a case like that, something that was put into the last budget or two budgets ago, that really it was a stand-alone bill, didn’t get enough support, just sort of died and then, hallelujah, resurrected in one of these wrap-up omnibus motions. So, the public had had an opportunity earlier, a year or two earlier to say something about this bill, but then it just showed up in a wrap-up motion. That’s the kind of thing that really the public… You don’t necessarily have to be a full-time lobbyist to really track this stuff. Even people in the legislature, and these are mostly Democrats we’re talking about, complain that even being right there in the legislature having access to every bit of information, they are often caught flat-footed by some of these proposals. So, that’s what we’re looking at and if the legislature decides that’s the way they want to run things, to the winner go the spoils, then that’s the way they will run, but we thought that it was important for people to understand this is how these things come down the pipe sometimes.

Marisa Wojcik:
You talk about how both parties are guilty of doing things like this, but also on a survey both parties have expressed that they don’t think that it should be that way.

Dee Hall:
Right, so the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council that I belong to and am active with, we did a survey of the assembly and the Senate candidates for 2018 and asked them do you think we should allow these anonymously authored motions, amendments and bills and everybody but one person said no, we shouldn’t. I will say that we had a lot bigger response from Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, but they all really agreed on this idea that you should really as one of the Republican candidates, he’s an incumbent, had stated, “If you’re not willing to stand behind your bill, “why are you asking me to?” So, I think that seems to be something that people are pretty… Let’s see what happens in the upcoming legislature. But it seems like, philosophically anyway, people do understand that it’s probably important for the authors of these bills to really be known and to stand up and say why are you putting this in and what do you want because then we can look at what kind of relationship does that person have, that lawmaker have with this industry, organization, individual who wants this change to happen. And then it just brings more transparency to why something’s happening.

Marisa Wojcik:
Well, Dee, thanks so much. It’s a really important story, especially as we’re heading into a new session and a new state legislature coming up. I’m guessing we’re going to see some more really awesome reporting on that, so thank you so much for being here.

Dee Hall:
Alright, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:
For more from Here & Now and Wisconsin Public Television, visit wpt.org and thanks so much for joining us on Noon Wednesday.