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Salus populi suprema lex esto, indeed. You’d normally associate tossing piles of paper to the floor with a fit of peevishness, but in the Missouri House of Representatives, it’s how they mark the end of session. The Wisconsin Assembly has come to the end of many exhausting sessions over the years, still it’s hard to imagine members celebrating by making a mess for somebody else to clean up. 

Missourinet news director Bob Priddy says the tradition Jefferson City seems to date from the mid-1980s. “The House used to have skits instead of throwing papers after adjournment. But that was back in the days when adjournment came at midnight on June 15 (talk about spoiling a spring and summer for everybody!).”

The Missouri Senate makes the end of the session in a more circumspect manner, as you might expect from a chamber where at least one member proposed a ban on seersucker suits.

Case in point, a message from Graeme Zielinski. The famously significant spokesman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin had, last we heard, been demoted to some indeterminate status (“media adviser”) following an imprudent comparison.

Zielinski’s message, appended to the subject line “cheers” and written without any apparent irony, is as follows:

After three-and-a-half years before the mast at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, I’m moving on. It was one hell of a ride and I’m proud of the work I’ve done, both before- and behind-the scenes.

It was an honor to fight passionately, honestly and with integrity for the values I love that have sustained the state and Party I love, all during some pretty momentous days.

As my Church teaches me, the rich and powerful can fend for themselves. It is up to progressive institutions to stand up for the rest of us, and that’s what I intend to do as I move forward, buoyed and strengthened by the great experience of my time with the Party.

Stay tuned and be in touch. In the immediate future, I’m working on an exciting writing project which you’ll hear more about soon-Cheers, GZ .

We wait, as they say, with bated breath.

This time around Republicans control the Joint Finance Committee, so they get to pick which items get to circumvent the tedious bill writing and introduction process by way of the budget, and Democrats get to fume over it. Hence Wednesday’s finance committee action on a motion to establish a catch-and-release only bass fishing season, from early March to early May, for parts of the state that do not have a continuous open season for bass fishing.

“No one likes to fish more than I do, but I will be opposing this, because we have a process,” said Senator Bob Wirch of Racine. “We have a Conservation Congress that votes on seasons out there, and lakes all over the state. These are sportsmen, but somehow, Joint Finance knows better than those sportsmen.”

“Maybe this is a good idea, maybe it’s a horrible idea, but it certainly has no place being slipped into the state budget with less than five minutes review,” said Representative Cory Mason of Racine. (Actually, they spent about 10 minutes on the issue.) “This is ridiculous. I understand that there’s policy that makes its way into the budget, but come on, really?”

“We’re messing around with the bass fishing season, something that has absolutely nothing with creating jobs, nothing to do with the state budget,” said Representative Jon Richards of Milwaukee. “Does this deal with large mouth bass, small mouth bass, rock bass? I’m confused.”

AUDIO: Joint Finance bass debate (10:00)

The motion’s author, Joint Finance co-chairman, Representative John Nygren of Marinette, thought he detected a note of jesting in Richards’ question, despite the fact that he’d earlier asked a similar question of legislative staff. “I’m not sure if you looked the economic impact of fishing and tourism in our state, especially up north. You may mock this, but when you get in the northern part of our state, there is no other industry that employs more people than tourism, and fishing is a big part of that. This may be funny to you, but there’s a lot of people this isn’t funny to. This is true economic development for the northern part of our state.”

Senator Jennifer Shilling of La Crosse was the last Democrat to weigh in on the issue, wisely steering clear of a pork barrel reference in favor of the always serviceable Christmas tree metaphor.”We’re at that point in the budget deliberations that it’s become a Christmas tree and we’re continuing to hang ornaments on the Christmas tree. I just wish that we could seek a little bit of policy discipline.” (Maybe next biennium, Senator. Hope springs eternal.)

Later on, Richards asked the Legislative Reference Bureau how many ornaments – I mean policy items – were added to the budget. (Andrew Beckett, who normally covers Joint Finance, clued me in to the fact that this happens almost every time the committee meets.) The answer, from LRB Director Bob Lang: 11 items added and one removed for a running total of 26.

A couple of Democrats on the committee, Rep. Melissa Sargent and Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, have referenced a table on page 56 of the Audit Bureau report. “Reported Jobs Created and Retained as a Result of Economic Development Awards Made in FY 2011-12.” The totals are 24,284 or 24,702, depending on the reporting.

Sargent did some quick math and said each job cost $39,880 for WEDC to retain.

WEDC Executive Director Reed Hall is up now for what promises to be a lengthy Q&A.

The bill, which would impose changes on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, has been hugely controversial in that county and has drawn sparse support from Democrats. So when Senator Lena Taylor of Milwaukee, the only Democratic cosponsor of the measure, asked the committee to support three amendments she’d authored, she may have been expecting smooth sailing.

Granted, as committee member Senator Joe Liebham noted, it’s a complex bill, and members could reasonably expect more time to consider the amendments from Taylor. But it might also have been reasonable to expect a little more discussion on the amendments. That didn’t happen. Instead, the committee chair, Senator Mary Lazich, called for a vote on the bill even as Taylor was on the phone with the measure’s Assembly author, Republican Joe Sanfelippo.

AUDIO: Senators Taylor, Lazich (3:50)

The vote was taken over Taylor’s protests, and Lazich gaveled the session to a close. She and Taylor continued their exchange out into the fourth floor hallway. I guess sometimes this is what democracy looks like.

The panel discussion on bipartisan approaches to the debt was pretty short on bipartisanship, but Holland is a UW sophomore with the requisite youthful optimism.

“The national debt is an issue that demands each and every one of us put our personal politics aside, in order to have a fair and pragmatic conversation about how we’re going to reduce our long-run deficit. Our politics should not get in the way our well being, yet they are. We each hold the power to change that.”

AUDIO: Alex Holland (3:05)

You can listen to some of the exchanges between Pocan and Johnson here. The event drew sparse media attention, but there are write-ups from The Capital Times and WisPolitics.

“People are not thrilled with Mother Nature. I went by the Post Office and saw her on a Most Wanted poster,” he joked. The jokes are probably getting a little bitter up north. We’re two days away from the fishing opener, and along with the wet, heavy snow (“most people consider this “heart attack” snow,” said Hessel.) there is still ice cover on many lakes in the area. As for Spring sports schedules, let’s just say they’ve been disrupted. The Hayward Hurricanes baseball team had to cancel a home game with Ashland on Thursday, which should have been the midway point in a 22 game season. They’ve played 5 games so far.

Milwaukee isn’t only not miserable, it’s positively exciting. That’s according to the folks at the MOVOTO blog (“the lighter side of real estate“), who rank Milwaukee #7 on 10 criteria:

• Park acreage per person
• Percent of population between 20 and 34 years old
• Fast food restaurants per square mile (the fewer the better)
• Bars per square mile
• Big box stores per square mile (the fewer the better)
• Population diversity
• Movie theaters per square mile
• Museums per square mile
• Theater companies per square mile 

“We would have never guessed that Milwaukee would make our list. It turns out that Brew City is simply solid on all of our criteria,” they wrote.

AB 40, Governor Scott Walker‘s state budget, includes a controversial plan to expand voucher schools, or school choice. The presenters were Dr. Bambi Statz, Executive Director of the Association for Equity in Funding, and Jerry Fiene, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance. The hearing, which ran over an hour and can be viewed here on WisconsinEye, was sparsely attended.

There was a lot of information in a Power Point presentation by Statz, who has spent her career in public education, including this final point:

“The expansion of vouchers is significant social re-engineering. As such, it should be debated in public by a standing committee of the legislature and then on the floor of the full legislature. The fate of vouchers should not be buried in the 2013-2015 budget.”

Schultz and Democrat Senator Bob Jauch – the only panel members who stayed for the entire hearing (Senator Jerry Petrowski was there for part of it), agreed with her, and that produced a couple of what we in radio refer to “sound bites” that were frankly memorable. Here’s Jauch:

AUDIO: Senator Bob Jauch (:26) 

“It is not a school district’s fault that a child’s parents, who spent the night in a booze hall, who don’t provide books and homework opportunities to nurture their child. It isn’t that school’s fault that that child missed school or slept in, didn’t get on the bus, doesn’t show up at school, or comes to school late, and not ready to learn.”

And Schultz, talking about the insistence by many Republicans that they won’t vote for a budget that doesn’t include school choice expansion:

AUDIO: Senator Dale Schultz (:23)

“To simply say “unless you give me my new middle class entitlement, I’m not going to vote for the budget” reminds me of that line from the Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith: “only Siths deal in absolutes.” Those Star Wars fans out there know where I’m coming from.”

I never saw that movie but I got where he was coming from.

The hearing – which Jauch and Schultz hope will get some viewership on “The Eye” came on the same day that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorialized against choice expansion, and a day after a pair of Republican lawmakers floated a tuition tax credit as an alternative. And that’s in addition to the plan’s shaky support in the Senate. Stay tuned.

Common Cause wants government at all levels to be able to regulate money in politics – and eventually passage of a Constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Edgar is in the Madison area this weekend for an “All About Citizens United”conference, and I had a chance to speak with him. Here’s a question he’ll pose at the event, taking place on Saturday in Fitchburg.

“Are we ready to be the founding fathers and mothers of democracy over the next hundred years? Are we content with the government that’s evolved over that last hundred years, or do we need some refinements and reforms of government, so that we can address global warming, that we can end the poverty that kills, and that we can protect democracy in the future? How do we get, in our time, the same kind of passion that our founding fathers had in creating democracy?”

 AUDIO: Bob Edgar (5:00)