Three weeks after Senate Democrats fled the state, the Wisconsin State Senate passed the bulk of the Budget Repair Bill in a series of swift and deliberate moves Wednesday.
Late in the afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and the GOP lawmakers assembled for the Special Session voted to send the bill to a bipartisan Senate-Assembly Conference Committee.
“This afternoon, following a week and a half of line‐by‐line negotiation, Sen. Miller sent me a letter that offered three options: 1) keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 2) take our counter‐offer, which would keep collective bargaining as is with no changes, 3) or stop talking altogether,” said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau). “With that letter, I realized that we’re dealing with someone who is stalling indefinitely, and doesn’t have a plan or an intention to return. His idea of compromise is “give me everything I and the only negotiating he’s doing is through the media.”
Shortly after 6pm, the Conference Committee convened and quickly approved Fitzgerald’s changes to the budget bill over the forceful objections of Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha).
Democrats fled the state on February 17th in an extreme parliamentary maneuver to prevent a 3/5th quorum from being present.
The Wisconsin Constitution requires more than a simple majority for passage of appropriation bills. A quorum of 3/5 of each house of the legislature is needed to pass any bill that “imposes, continues or renews a tax, or creates a debt or charge, or makes, continues or renews an appropriation of public or trust money, or releases, discharges or commutes a claim or demand of the state.”
To dispatch the 3/5th quorum concerns, the Conference Committee amended the bill, stripping it of appropriations and bonding authority but retaining the collective bargaining changes and other provisions.
It was a move many had speculated for weeks that the GOP could make. On Wednesday, Senate GOP leaders pulled the trigger.
From Illinois, Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D-Monona) issued a statement, “Tonight, 18 Senate Republicans conspired to take government away from the people,” Miller said. “We will join the people of Wisconsin in taking back their government.”
Among the items removed from the bill were nearly $250 million in debt restructuring and lapses of authorized spending to the Department of Administration, as well as a reversal on the sale of state power plants to private entities.
Increased funding to the Department of Corrections and the state’s Medicaid programs, needed to forestall shortfalls in those programs were also not included in the Conference Committee report. Planned changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit and an audit of eligibility requirements for state entitlement programs were also scrapped.
Despite the presence of financial provisions in the bill, Fitzgerald said in the Conference Committee the move to vote was reviewed and cleared by three important non-partisan state agencies – the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the Legislative Council and the Legislative Reference Bureau.
“The people of Wisconsin elected us to do a job,” Fitzgerald said. “They elected us to stand up to the broken status quo, stop the constant expansion of government, balance the budget, create jobs and improve the economy.”
The unamendable bill now awaits action in the State Assembly where passage is expected.