Scott Walker Proposes Shutting Wisconsin Ethics Board

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said on Monday that he wanted to eliminate the state’s Government Accountability Board, a nonpartisan agency that oversees elections, ethics, campaign finance and lobbying.

In 2012, the board voted unanimously to approve an election to recall Mr. Walker, the first governor in the state’s history to face such a challenge, and it later authorized an investigation into allegations of violations by the governor’s campaign in that election.

Mr. Walker would replace the board with “something completely new that is truly accountable to the people of the state of Wisconsin,” he told reporters after a bill-signing ceremony.

Mr. Walker’s comments came after the State Supreme Court on Thursday ended the investigation into whether his 2012 recall campaign illegally coordinated with conservative groups.

Kevin J. Kennedy, the board’s director and general counsel, said in a statement that the agency, established in 2008, had been praised as a national model for administering laws that govern campaign finance and elections.

Majority opinion:

• The justice says the special prosecutor, Francis Schmitz, rooted his probe in “vague, overbroad” sections of the state’s campaign finance law, giving him too much discretion:

The lack of clarity in Ch. 11, which the special prosecutor relies upon, leads us to the unsettling conclusion that it is left to government bureaucrats and/or individual prosecutors to determine how much coordination between campaign committees and independent groups is “too much” coordination. In essence, under his theory, every candidate, in every campaign in which an issue advocacy group participates, would get their own John Doe proceeding and their own special prosecutor to determine the extent of any coordination. This is not, and cannot, be the law in a democracy…

The special prosecutor has disregarded the vital principle that in our nation and our state political speech is a fundamental right and is afforded the highest level of protection. The special prosecutor’s theories…would assure that such political speech will be investigated with paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours and then prosecuted and punished. In short, the special prosecutor completely ignores the command that, when seeking to regulate issue advocacy groups, such regulation must be done with “narrow specificity.”

• The justice defends the decision by a state judge presiding over the investigation to quash subpoenas in the case:

John Doe judges are given enormous discretion to control the scope and conduct of a John Doe proceeding. With this important point in mind, we now turn to the specific issue before us: whether Reserve Judge Peterson violated a plain legal duty when he quashed the subpoenas and search warrants and ordered the return of all seized property. He did not.

• The opinion concludes with another reprimand of the special prosecutor:

Our lengthy discussion of these three cases can be distilled into a few simple, but important, points. It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them......Source

This needs to go too:

....For more than a century, the university system has been guided by the Wisconsin Idea...

The Wisconsin Idea is the policy developed in the American state of Wisconsin that fosters public universities' contributions to the state: "to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities". A second facet of the philosophy is the effort "to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefiting the greatest number of people". During the Progressive Era, proponents of the Wisconsin Idea saw the state as "the laboratory for democracy", resulting in legislation that served as a model for other states and the federal government.....

In Education....

In Politics....

In Media....

http://www.wsj.com/articles/wisconsins-friend-at-the-irs-1436482521

Wisconsin’s campaign to investigate conservative tax-exempt groups has always seemed like an echo of the IRS’s scrutiny of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. It turns out that may be more than a coincidence.

http://www.redstate.com/2015/07/10/lois-lerner-kevin-kennedy-dead-kids-wisconsin-gab-irs/

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Possible PERSONAL link between Wisconsin GAB / IRS witch hunts targeting conservatives discovered.

By: Moe Lane (Diary) | July 10th, 2015 at 03:00 PM | 23

Emails we’ve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections. The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch. “Are you available for the 25th?” Ms. Lerner wrote in January 2012. “If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.”

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