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Assembly Republicans directly lobby school districts into reopening

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Republican leadership in the state Assembly are directly lobbying school districts into reopening.

That letter sent out to school superintendents was obtained by UpNorthNews.

Signed by 47 Assembly Republicans, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Majority leader Jim Steinike, the letter tells superintendents that they have an obligation to educate students, and that virtual schooling may not meet that obligation in some cases.

It also suggests that if districts don’t reopen to students the GOP will call for the Department of Public Instruction to examine greater open enrollment, which would divert school taxes away from individual districts.

Speaker Vos did not respond to a request for comment, and Representative Stieneke’s office said he was not available.

State Democrats introduce package of unemployment reform bills

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Legislative Democrats have unveiled a package of bills to make it easier for Wisconsinites to claim and file for unemployment.

State Senator Janice Ringhand says they want to undo some of the obstacles that were erected in getting unemployment during the Walker administration. 

(“There were a lot of bills that were passed between 2011 and 2018 that made it more complicated to get unemployment. So this will eliminate some of those obstructions that were put in place during that time frame.”

The bills would peel back application requirements, and would reduce the amount of work Wisconsinites have to do during each week to continue claiming unemployment. 

“There was a bill that was forwarded several years ago that requires four work searches every week, and this reduces that to two. And it gives D W D more authority to make individual decisions.”

The bill will also allow people who both work and qualify for disability benefits to file for unemployment, and allow those getting job skills training to apply as well. 

State Supreme Court rules for Republicans in Lame Duck Law challenge

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has once again ruled in favor of Republicans in the legislature, in a series of lawsuits challenging the Lame Duck Laws. The ruling is being praised by majority leaders in both chambers.

In an opinion issued on Thursday, the court upheld laws passed by Republicans in 2018 that limit some of the powers of the Governor’s office.

One of those laws prevents the governor and the attorney general’s office from leaving federal lawsuits that the state has joined. That law was enacted to keep Governor Tony Evers from dropping out of a number of controversial lawsuits the state was involved in during the Walker administration.

“We had a race for governor in 2018. I won. Unfortunately, things got off on the wrong foot because Republicans immediately passed a law overriding the will of the people and the election, and they’ve been sour grapes ever since,” Evers said on Twitter.

The court also upheld a measure that requires the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee to sign off on lawsuit settlements for the state. That law has led to a protracted standoff between Republicans and Attorney General Josh Kaul on just how the JFC will be allowed to be read in on confidential cases.

Among many provisions, the ruling requires that Attorney General Kaul send settlements to the Joint Committee on Finance for review, according to a statement from Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the Legislature and all Wisconsinites who want to hold government accountable. A rogue attorney general can no longer unilaterally settle away laws already on the books and unelected bureaucrats can’t expand their powers beyond what the people have given them through their representatives.”

“In grasping at power after the 2018 elections, legislative Republicans demonstrated open hostility to outcomes chosen by Wisconsin voters and made it more difficult for state government to function effectively,” said AG Kaul in a statement. “Today’s decision leaves for another day a ruling on whether most applications of two provisions undermining the authority of the Office of Attorney General are constitutional, but the ultimate result is inevitable: those provisions will be found to be unconstitutional in nearly all of their applications.”

“Our state’s founders established co-equal branches of government in Wisconsin,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in a statement. “This ruling reaffirms that each branch is equal to the other. This idea runs counter to what the governor and attorney general seem to believe. They deem the executive branch is the most important one and should unilaterally rule over the state.”

Open records expert says secret Evers Administration recording is not illegal

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Legislative Republicans continue to challenge Governor Tony Evers over a recording that was made public because of an open records request.

Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders says the issue is that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did not expect to be recorded.

“I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t have been a better process if the whole thing had been done in the open. I mean people behave better when they know they’re being watched so I don’t understand why there’s such a need for secrecy about a communication like that.”

Lueders says that even if there’s no documentation about who actually made that recording, it’s probably legally a moot point because only one person who was part of that call needed to consent to it being made. 

“I don’t know how you record a conversation among people without someone who is in on that conversation being aware of it. They would have had to facilitate it or allow it in some way.”

The law also doesn’t require any specific documentation for that consent. Lueders says while this is an unusual situation, if someone had simply taken down a transcript there would be no issue. 

So far the Evers administration has not identified who the person that made the recording was, only that it was being handled internally.

Senator Baldwin backs sweeping federal police reform bill

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Senator Tammy Baldwin is backing a sweeping bill to overhaul how police departments are run in the United States.

Baldwin says too often police have to deal with issues that they’ve never been trained for. 

“They often become mental health counselors, social workers, dealing with addiction issues that should be handled by other professionals and would result in greater community safety if we made those investments.”

Baldwin says having a public safety presence through policing shouldn’t change. “But I do think it’s healthy when we take more than a moment to look at what we’ve built and what might be better to promote safety in our communities.”

Among its many proposals, the bill will peel back qualified immunity laws that protect police from being sued, require more reporting on use of force by police departments, and create a federal registry of police officers who are fired from their jobs for misconduct.

Evers pushes for bill on police use of force procedures in wake of George Floyd protests

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Governor Tony Evers wants to take action to help Black Wisconsinites in the wake of a weekend’s worth of protests. 

Evers says that while these particular protests were sparked by the death of George Floyd, Wisconsin has its own cases to consider. 

“We hear the echo of the words of Eric Garner. We relive the pain of the death of Black Wisconsinites like Dontre Hamilton, Sylville Smith, Ernest Lacy, and Tony Robinson.”

Evers is backing a bill that would require police departments to be trained on de-escalation tactics and to prioritize saving lives in critical situations instead of resorting to force. He says efforts must be made to start undoing generations of oppression. 

“We must be willing to face it, with clear eyes and open hearts, recognizing that folks who look like me have been part of creating, exacerbating, and benefiting from the systems that we must now turn to dismantle.”

“We must condemn all those who encourage violence against Black lives. We must offer our compassion, we must offer our support, but most of all, we must offer our action.”

The bill has already stalled once in the Republican controlled legislature, and it’s unclear if leadership will meet to discuss the issue while already on recess. 

DWD Secretary Frostman explains delays in unemployment claims

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Some people in Wisconsin who are waiting on an unemployment check could be waiting until October.  The Department of Workforce Development says it could take that long to clear the backlog of people waiting to have their jobless claims processed.

The agency says the current unemployment claims backlog stands at 112-thousand cases. State Senator Chris Kapenga says D-W-D needs to figure out how to erase that backlog as quickly as possible.

“I am completely confused as to why someone who filed for unemployment insurance eight weeks ago has not had their data put into a batch to be processed by COBOL.”

The state’s unemployment program has been struggling to handle all the claims that have been made since the state of the pandemic, and there’s a good reason, according to DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman.

He laid out just how hard the unemployment system was hit at the start of the pandemic. “Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways, our call systems were not built to handle 5.8 million calls a week which is a 20-000 percent increase over last year’s busiest week.”

Frostman says his office has already made fantastic efforts to handle the massive influx of claims. 

“We increased the capacity for our Help Center by 200% in 10 days by adding two additional session border controllers and performing load balancing.  Ordering processes that normally took one month were reduced to 28 hours, and we’re now able to accept 160 calls per second, and handle 690 simultaneous calls.”

“Once we stop accepting new calls each evening, our staff still completes hours of work to clear the call queues, process claims, call back claimants, and issue payments ahead of the nightly ACH deadline,” he told a committee panel on Wednesday. 

Frostman says the bottlenecks in processing are entirely down to not having enough people who are properly vetted under state and federal statutes to do the work of actually processing claims.

Senator Baldwin introduces new bill to offer more pandemic relief to farmers

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Senator Tammy Baldwin is looking to increase relief funding to farmers being harmed by disruptions in the nation’s food supply chains.

Baldwin says her new Farming Support to States Act would directly help farmers whose main sources of sales are cut off during the pandemic response. She cites the examples of dairy farmers who usually sell to outfits that supply large food service partners.

“And these large-scale buyers, because of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, their orders have dropped off at least like a cliff.”

Since dairy farms are always producing milk, being unable to sell that product has lead to milk dumping, among other issues. 

“Many farmers in Wisconsin are finding they have to dump milk and there’s nothing more heartbreaking than that for somebody who worked hard to produce a high-quality nutritious product.”)

Baldwin says that even the smallest bump in the supply chain can cause massive disruptions, when the food industry is tooled to be as streamlined as possible.

 

Disabled voters file federal lawsuit over botched ballots and voting in Spring Election

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A group of disabled Wisconsinites is filing a lawsuit against the state elections commission over its handling of the Spring Elections.

The lawsuit is being filed by a group of immunocompromised voters who were either forced to go to the polls in person on April 7th or had issues casting their absentee ballots.

The federal lawsuit, filed with the help of the group Protect Democracy, seeks to have absentee ballots sent to all voters in the presidential election in November, to ensure that the elections commission is ready to get poll workers to everywhere in the state, and to increase in person absentee voting opportunities. 

Head of state grocery association wants Governor Evers to consider WMC plan

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The head of the Wisconsin Grocers Association is hoping things get better soon when it comes to Safer At Home, but he doesn’t want to rush things.

CEO Brandon Scholz says that while it would be nice to just open up all of Wisconsin’s businesses, there’s got to be controls in place to keep people safe.

“That’s more than reasonable to expect. The Department of Health Services has got to keep the pressure on to diminish the spread and and limited and it eventually stop it.”

Scholz says the Back to Business plan laid out by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce offers up a good guideline to start with. 

“We do believe that it’s important to get Wisconsin back moving again, and we agree with the governor too that this just isn’t going to happen overnight. You have to take steps to get there.”

“We think those are things that can be done in conjunction with other steps to bring people back to work to bring their spending back into our economy to get people off unemployment rolls, says Scholz.

He says that while some of his member stores have started requesting that customers wear masks inside, he won’t be putting out that recommendation, and wants to leave it up to his members to decide.