Legislature ready to throw up road blocks to issues people care about

It looks to be a busy week, finally, for the Wisconsin Legislature. After earning the title of the nation’s least busy full-time state legislature, lawmakers are finally ready to weigh in on Governor Tony Evers’ budget proposal. Because Republicans control the Legislature, they are free to do what they want with the Governor’s $91 billion spending plan, and what they will largely do is say no. Lawmakers plan to strip some 300 items from Evers’ plan and largely start from scratch outlining their ideas for making Wisconsin better. They are right that a lot of items in the budget don’t really belong there, because they are policy issues not fiscal issues. So go ahead and remove them. But don’t ignore them. These are issues Wisconsinites want to see action on. They are at the very least worthy of debate. Ideas like criminal justice reform, creating statewide standards for PFAS and legalizing medicinal or recreational marijuana. The chairman of the state budget committee called those issues “divisive.” Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean that our politicians can’t hold hearings on them and even schedule them for a vote. Removing these divisive items from the budget should not be their death nail. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about the divisive issues, even if they don’t belong in a state budget.