The Democratic Process

In a letter to the editor of the Appleton Post-Crescent, Rep. Dean Kaufert said he couldn't vote for the pulling motion on SB 1, an ethics reform bill, because pulling motions are a "violations of the democratic process" only meant to embarrass leadership. SB 1 did highlight a violation of the democratic process, but it was not the pulling motion.

Pulling motions are used to bring a bill to floor the leadership refuses to schedule for an up or down floor vote. They are often used by the minority party to try to bring bills they support to the floor when the majority party will not schedule them for floor action.

In his letter to the editor, Kaufert said he never supports pulling motions as rule but a look at his voting record proves that statement to be false. It's easy to understand why Kaufert would have supported a couple of pulling motions back in the early 90s since his party was not in control of the Assembly at the time. It's also understandable that he might have forgotten that he voted for those pulling motions. However, he supported a pulling motion as recently as 2001 with his vote to bring AB 675, a bill to allow people to carry concealed weapons, to floor with a pulling motion.

If you compare the histories of SB 1 from 2005 session and AB 675 from the 2001 session, under Kaufert's line of defense for his vote against bringing SB 1 to the floor, you would expect to find that AB 675 enjoyed a much more extensive public debate than SB 1 did.

But you'd be wrong. The bill histories for these proposals are very similar. Only the subject matter differed. The bill history for AB 675 is here and the bill history for SB 1 is here.

Both had more than one public hearing. Both were amended and passed by committee. The only major difference is that SB 1 passed the senate with overwhelming support and had been passed by committees in both chambers when the pulling motion was made as opposed to AB 675 which was only passed by a committee in the assembly at the time of the pulling motion.

The only real violation of the democratic process was the Assembly Leadership's attempt to say the bill could not come to the floor because the Assembly Republicans had voted in secret not to bring it to the floor.

What Rep. Kaufert really wanted was to have his cake and eat it too by claiming he supports the bill, as he did in his letter to the editor, but not have the bill actually passed into law. That way he and his colleagues can claim they stand for strong ethics reform when they go home to run for re-election, but they don't have to actually abide by any tough new laws.