Ridiculous

I am crushed. My favorite blogger, Dennis York, thinks I'm being ridiculous for criticizing Senator Glenn Grothman and others for their recent meetings out of the spotlight about the so-called Taxpayer Protection Amendment (TPA). It's not everyday I get called ridiculous by someone using a pink pig puppet to represent themselves so I feel I need to address his issues.

There are plenty of reasons why the TPA is bad and I promise to get into those in the future. But the process for this is also important because it is what caused this amendment to come to life in the first place. The process highlights the arrogance of the state legislators supporting the TPA when it comes to local elected officials. This arrogance combined with their dishonesty about the cost of government often translates into bad legislation and this amendment is the worst of their work to make local elected officials responsible for their failings at the state level.

Senators Grothman and Darling were probably not very confident they were going to hear the local electeds praising this proposed amendment that would choke off local financing while still demanding the same services from local governments. The legislature loves to pass new programs local electeds have to pay for, take credit for them, and then blame everyone around them for runaway spending.

Recently the legislature even tried to pin the blame on Governor Doyle by passing some ridiculous bill to create a committee to identify local mandates and then complaining that Governor Doyle vetoed it because it was unnecessary. The legislature doesn't need a new bill or Doyle's signature to create this committee or identify the mandates they have created for local government. They just need to do it. They just wanted someone else to blame.

I would have applauded Senator Grothman calling for these meetings about two years ago. Local elected officials have been complaining about TABOR and amendments like it for years now. The complaints have fallen deaf ears as the Republican legislators were more interested in writing campaign literature that says they support TABOR , TPA, or whatever they want to call it than getting the opinions of local elected officials on this important issue.

And the press needs to be there. Perhaps if there were more meetings like these, with the press there so the public could see how the locals elected officials felt on this issue and it was documented so the legislators can't pretend they didn't know, we wouldn't have a 9-page constitutional amendment with 13 senators and 26 assemblypeople sponsoring it that are not sure what it is does and are just now getting around to seriously asking the local elected leaders how they feel about it.

Thirty-nine state legislators and Mark Green, a candidate for governor, are apparently sponsoring a major constitutional amendment simply because they like the sound of the title and how it will look on campaign literature. They introduced it, put out press releases about how great it is, and then stopped to ask what it will do to local communities while hoping the press wouldn't be there to write about it? That ought to make anyone stand up and take notice.