I’ve been a fan of the website Overlawyered.com for some time now, and I’ve been invited to guest blog there next week. It deals primarily with goofy lawsuits, and how abuse of the legal system costs us all. (On the other hand, abuse of the penal system only costs you your eternal soul. And vision.)

I believe I’ll be starting on Tuesday – So feel free to send me tips on things you want to see posted at cmschneid – at – hotmail.com.

You may recall the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s ridiculous report last month that purported to show that “big business” contributed 12 times as much as unions to Wisconsin candidates.  Naturally, the “study” was reported as if it were the Ten Commandments.

I examined the flaws in the report in this post.  In fact, you don’t even need to take my word for it – opensecrets.org has a listing of the largest contributors to federal candidates since 1989-90.  Here’s the top 10:

While these are federal candidates, and the WDC report deals with state candidates, does anyone actually believe somehow unions ignore Wisconsin politicians?  Of course not.

The controversy in Madison surrounding the naming of a new school after Hmong leader General Vang Pao has been beaten to death locally, but it can provide some important lessons for the future for the rest of the state.

First of all, there really isn’t anyone in this whole charade to root for. Sure, the gutless Madison school board was unwilling to stand up to the Hmong community when they were pushing for a school to be named after a questionable (and living) general. However, some citizens opposed naming the school after Vang because he had been involved in (gasp!) a military conflict.  One parent went so far as to say that if you named the school after a military leader, then you couldn’t teach children not to fight in school (As has been the case, apparently, with kids who attend schools named “Washington,” “Lincoln,” “Kennedy,” etc.)

The facts are well known: Madison is building a new elementary school on the far west side. When soliciting names for the school, the school district received 41 suggestions, ranging from Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson to Gaylord Nelson to Ronald Reagan. Amid much lobbying from the Hmong community in Madison, including Hmong board member Shwaw Vang, the Madison School Board unanimously approved naming the school after General Vang Pao, who led Hmong soldiers in defense of the United States in the Vietnam War.

There’s a problem, however. Vang Pao had been accused of some questionable activities in his past, including allegations of drug running. And since he is still living, it opened up the door for him to do something else to embarrass the school district – which is exactly what happened, when he was arrested in California on charges of building a militia to violently overthrow the government of Laos.

The lesson here is clear: Don’t name buildings after living people. They screw up. Sometimes spectacularly.

There are ways of getting around this that may be acceptable. In recent years, the state opened the Risser Justice Building in Madison. In that case, the building is named after the Risser Family, who have had a father and son both serve in the Legislature. (Fred Risser was first elected in 1956, and still serves in the Senate. There’s a decent chance that the 26^th Senate District will be represented by Fred Risser’s cryogenically frozen brain for the next 200 years).

By naming it after a family, you can deflect the actions of a bad actor – such as if Fred Risser were caught in bed with a giraffe (which, incidentally, would only be slightly less embarrassing than Tommy Thompson’s presidential campaign – and Thompson has had state buildings named after him).

It takes a person’s death for us to properly put them in the context of our history. That should be the standard by which we hand out building names.

Furthermore, for new schools, it makes sense to name them after the neighborhood in which they are built. That way, something as simple as naming a school doesn’t turn into the “racial grievance Olympics” every time one is built. If the school board is compelled to honor a minority when naming a school, there are some civil rights titans that remain underappreciated (Thurgood Marshall, for instance).

The Madison School Board has made the right decision to rename the west side school.  Let’s hope they get it right this time.

Despite their supposed “nonpartisan” affiliation, the League of Women Voters has traditionally been a solid supporter of liberal causes.  A trip to their own website reveals their positions supporting universal health care and gun control, opposing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge, and on and on.

This week, the Wisconsin State Senate held a hearing on the so-called “Frankenstein Veto,” which would prohibit governors from abusing their veto power by stitching together two or more sentences to make an entirely new law that the legislature never intended. In the previous budget, 750 individual words were vetoed out of the bill to come up with a single sentence that transferred $427 million out of the transportation fund and into the general fund – something the legislature never considered in their deliberation of the budget.

Supporters of the bill tend to be the good-government types. Testifying in opposition were groups like WEAC, the state teachers’ union, who benefited the most from the aforementioned use of the Frankenstein Veto. (One wonders how they would have been testifying had the creative veto authority been used to cut their funding, rather than increasing it.)

The League of Women Voters testified “for information only,” in language that can best be described as confusing.

Their testimony said:

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin is committed to representative government as established by the constitutions of the United States and the State of Wisconsin.  For this reason, we register our concern with AJR1 and SJR5.  While the proposed amendment purports to ban the partial veto of an appropriations bill, it fails to solve the basic problem of whether or not the Governor has the ability to change the intent of appropriations passed by the Legislature.

The current amendment continues to allow for deleting parts of a single sentence.  Furthermore, it would permit governors to delete larger portions of an enrolled bill as long as they do not “create a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill.”

Our concern about the partial veto is not a partisan one.  Governors of both parties have used the partial veto extensively.  The laws that result from the exercise of the partial veto frequently contain new taxation or new programs that have not been considered or enacted by the Legislature.  Whether or not we agree with the results of these vetoes, the fact remains that the people of the State of Wisconsin, represented in the Senate and Assembly, are denied participation in the process.This particular amendment attempts to address that failing.  However, as written it would not eliminate the Governor’s ability to create new taxation or programs through a partial veto in the final step of the budget process.

Huh?

So they are for representative government, and think the governor’s current veto authority violates that principle.  But they oppose any action to rein it in, because it doesn’t go far enough?  They say that the proposed amendment would allow governors to veto large sections of the bill – is this something they oppose?  This is similar to the item veto virtually every other state has.  Do they think the governor should only be able to veto the whole budget?

The more likely scenario is that they wanted to oppose the bill to side with the governor, but they couldn’t be on the wrong side of a good government issue.  So they used the tactic of saying the bill doesn’t go far enough – which puts them in the strange position of having to argue how Wisconsin is better off if the legislature doesn’t pass an amendment that gets closer to their stated goal of “representative government.”