As I See It
Once again, Wisconsin Legislature fails to act
It may be a new year, but things remain much the same in Madison. Our state legislature has continued the trend of ignoring the Governor’s call for action. Governor Tony Evers called the legislature into a special session to take up unemployment reform. After the pandemic hit, Wisconsin’s unemployment claims became backlogged, and there has been plenty of finger-pointing over who is to blame. Evers asked legislators to agree to spend more than $5 million to update the state’s outdated unemployment system, which continues to struggle to process claims. He called them into special session, and this week, the Legislature opened the meeting, then immediately adjourned while taking no action. They didn’t tweak the Governor’s plan, or come up with their own. They simply punted. This is becoming a disturbing trend. Evers has called the legislature into special session seven times since taking office, on important issues such as gun control, racial justice and the pandemic. Not once did that call for a special session lead to any legislation to address the problem. That is not leadership. That is an abdication of duty. Our lawmakers need to get back to work, and stop with the political theatre.
Mary White
January 21, 2021 at 5:16 am
Thank you for your article regarding the legislation who just ignore the problems Wisconsin faces. Governor Evers should be allowed to govern!! Is there any recourse here? We, as the citizens of Wisconsin should not let this go. I appreciate the concern of our legislators whojust sit on their hands.
Mike Sladky
January 21, 2021 at 7:56 am
I almost started to cry reading this opinion piece. Have a nice day.
David
January 21, 2021 at 10:02 am
Time to clean house
Patricia LaBrosse
January 21, 2021 at 10:26 am
This angers me that the Republican side just walks away and does nothing. Sound familiar? Time to clean house.
Mart
January 21, 2021 at 11:02 am
Open everything, there’d be no need for welfare!
Bree
January 27, 2021 at 3:58 pm
It isn’t as simple as ‘open everything’ & all the problems with unemployment vanish because all the jobs will be back. That is a simplistic and flawed approach to a complex problem. Anyone with comprehension of the situation realizes that there is a virus circulating that might kill you, but if you do catch it it is most likely that you will get very sick and you also have a chance of sustaining long term damage to your cardiovascular or neurological systems or even have chronic fatigue that limits functioning long after a person has had the viral infection. Until the pandemic is brought under control, people will not resume their normal activities. They will be afraid to, regardless of what is open. And almost everything in the state of Wisconsin has been open since the poor state supreme court decision in April of 2020. That is the reality. In the meantime the state GOP does nothing to help citizens of the state deal with the pandemic and they refuse to work in conjunction with the governor on anything. It’s pathetic and it’s no time to be playing political games. Whatever the Republican party is doing they should really make a course correction because it isn’t serving their party well, nor the citizens they are supposed to represent. They must think that this will all fall back on Governor Evers and they hope to install someone from their party next election cycle I’m sure. Voters need to hold the party who helped exacerbate this pandemic accountable rather than the person who has been hobbled from enacting any helpful measures for close to a year now.