State Republicans play budget games in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina

In 2016, North Carolina’s Republicans lost their stranglehold on state government with the election of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. In 2018, voters in Michigan and Wisconsin likewise returned Democrats to their state’s governors’ mansions.

Rather than listen to the will of voters and at least try to work with the newly elected Democrats, Republicans in all three states called lame duck sessions to limit the new officials’ powers before their inaugurations. Now, with a new fiscal year in sight, Republicans in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina are creating roadblocks in the way of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of state government: passing a budget.

In Michigan, Republicans shut the legislature down for most of the summer rather than work with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to resolve the crisis of the state’s worst-in-the-nation roads. In Wisconsin, a conservative group has gone to court to overturn Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ budget vetoes. In North Carolina—which wrote the power grab playbook during its own notorious lame-duck session back in 2016—Cooper has vetoed a Republican budget that blocked Medicaid expansion and didn’t include increases in spending on education that the governor called for.

“I think [the Republican budget obstruction] is frankly somewhat pathetic,” David Turner, the communications director for the Democratic Governors Association, told Daily Kos. “It seems to me that the Republican Party down at the state level has transformed into lemmings, following the Mitch McConnell example of how you're not supposed to govern.”

Experts in Wisconsin and North Carolina painted a picture of state Republican parties violating democratic principles, refusing to even hold hearings on state cabinet officials, and introducing a tax refund bill for a state that hasn’t even passed a budget yet. A representative from Gov. Whitmer’s office declined to comment on that state’s situation, and neither Gov. Evers’ nor Gov. Cooper’s office replied to requests for an interview.

According to Dr. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the budget issues all three states are embroiled in are partially the result of gerrymandering so radical that it constitutes “a violation of basic democratic principles.”

In June, Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal judiciary isn’t allowed to hear claims related to partisan gerrymandering in cases involving North Carolina and Maryland. As a result, Wisconsin’s Democrats announced plans to drop their own anti-gerrymandering lawsuit—and the state’s Republicans announced they may try to force the Democrats to pay the court costs involved in the Democrats’ efforts to ensure fair elections.

In Michigan, the state’s Republicans are going to court to overturn a voter-approved ballot proposal creating a strictly nonpartisan commission to redraw the state’s legislative districts.

A budget has passed in Wisconsin, but a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), has sued to overturn some of Evers’ vetoes. JR Ross, editor of WisPolitics.com, told Daily Kos that WILL may be an independent organization but that it is “pretty much in lockstep” with the state’s Republicans and that the group has “staffed up” since Gov. Evers’ election.

Ross added that, ever since the state’s 2018 lame duck session during which Republican legislators and former Gov. Scott Walker passed several laws to limit the incoming administration’s powers, “it's basically a poisonous atmosphere at the Capitol between Governor Evers and Republican lawmakers. Even when they agree on things, they can't agree on how to do them.” Almost eight months into his term, the state’s Republicans have yet to approve a single one of Gov. Evers’ cabinet nominees.

Both Ross and Burden added that at least some of the blame for Wisconsin’s budget and other deadlocked issues rests with other factors. “There's definitely opportunism on both sides of the aisle, with groups complaining about things that they were fine with when their party was doing it,” Burden said, particularly with regard to going to court to try to settle scores when one side didn’t get what it wanted.

Wisconsin Republicans are also taking issue with the vast amount of power vested in Wisconsin’s governor, including the authority to surgically alter a budget passed by the legislature through the use of strategically worded vetoes.

“Republicans will tell you that even if Governor Walker had won his third term they would've brought up some of these ideas designed, in their mind, to re-balance the powers between branches,” Ross explained.

While the sides in Wisconsin battle each other in state and federal court, North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has vetoed a proposed budget that didn’t expand Medicaid and failed to provide additional funding for education, two of his key issues.

“Really, I think it’s kind of a classic stalemate,” said Dr. Chris Cooper (no relation to Gov. Cooper), head of the political science department at Western Carolina University. Republicans lead the state’s General Assembly, but they don’t have the votes to override the governor’s veto; the governor, for his part, can’t pass a budget without Republican votes.

In North Carolina, most state government functions are funded at the previous year’s level until the next budget is passed. That lack of pressure may be part of the reason why, despite having a lock on both the legislative branch and governor’s mansion, in 2015 North Carolina didn’t have a new budget until September.

According to this Aug. 15 report by The Charlotte Observer, state taxpayers are on the hook for $42,000 every day the state legislature remains in session after it would normally be adjourned. The state’s legislative Republicans have also decided, rather than help fund health care or a better education for residents, to introduce a bill to give much of the state’s $897 million budget surplus back to taxpayers in the form of rebates of $125 per person.

Dr. Cooper told Daily Kos that the bill sets up a “really interesting” situation in which Gov. Cooper and state legislative Democrats will be put in the position of opposing a tax rebate during the 2020 election season. “And there's this other wrinkle,” Cooper added, “that what are the ethics, and perhaps legality, of giving people a refund before you have a budget?”

In Michigan, Republicans’ determination to do anything but raise real revenue for the roads has finally ticked off one of the state party’s staunchest allies. On Aug. 20, the president of the state’s Chamber of Commerce warned in a press conference that it expects the legislature to come up with the revenue to fund the estimated $2 billion needed to bring the state’s roads up to par.

On the same day, a Republican legislator from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula made it clear that, if the state’s government does end up shutting down over the road funding impasse, legislative Republicans have a plan for that: blame Gov. Whitmer.

Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2PqPx3y