I have been quietly enjoying Owen's attempt to get Assembly Republicans to pledge allegiance to his own narrow, subjective determinations of what is or is not an acceptable budget. And I have to give him credit, too. If you would've told me five years ago that the most powerful voice in the Republican Party was some guy blogging in his basement, I would've blown milk out my nose. That people are even paying attention to this is a credit to how far the blogosphere has come.
Way to go, bloggers.
But as usual, a conservative is badly miscalculating the politics of the situation because he is too vested in a particular, ideologically-driven outcome. This is often the problem with ideologues. Their allegiance to their convictions is so strong that they can't figure out how to build the coalitions necessary to get anything done.
At this point, nine Assembly Republicans have signed on to Owen's pledge, which basically allows him to subjectively determine by his own standards whether or not a budget contains fees that are used for the purpose of balancing the general fund. As we all know, money is fungible - so determining that in an absolute sense is nearly impossible.
In reading Owen's posts, there are clear flaws in both the logical and tactical reasoning he puts forward. Again, I admire his commitment to the cause. But there is a reason that when we make political predictions, I am generally right and he is generally wrong. I see the political world as it is. He is motivated by a desire to see particular policies implemented. After all, how else could someone pick Mark Green by 7, unless they believe that West Bend is somehow representative of reality?
First, the logical fallacy.
One of the principal arguments that TABOR supporters made for levy limits at the local level was that local governments were careless with taxpayer money, and that Wisconsinites couldn't be trusted to keep local governments in line because of their abysmal turnout rates in spring elections. When moderates argued for a state-only TABOR, conservatives balked and called them RINOs. "No," they said, "the state has to impose the limits on everyone."
Now, I've got Owen telling me that hey, some locals might raise property taxes through the roof, and that's okay because their constituents will sort it out in local elections. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that "most (local units of government) will be held back by their constituents."
So a few years ago, we couldn't be trusted to keep local governments in line without heavy-handed assistance from the state. Now, miraculously, we can. A few years ago, we were told not to trust the electoral process. Now, we're told we should.
I guess Mike Huebsch isn't the only one around here who wears two faces.
By Owen's new logic, a TABOR enacted at the state level for local governments was completely and totally unnecessary. But hey, when you're King of the Idiots, I guess you don't need to be consistent, because surely the lemmings aren't smart enough to demand it.
Now onto the politics.
Huebsch and Friends still need to pass some semblance of a budget out of the Assembly, and they're going to need 50 Republican votes to do it. I can assure you that Kreuser and Company are not going to allow their Democratic colleagues to stray on this. They want to watch the Republicans squirm. They want to see the Republicans put together something that they can use in hit pieces against vulnerable Republicans next fall.
Contrary to Owen's belief, Republicans can't just sit on the sideline and let state departments and programs run on continuation budgets. Perhaps because Owen is newer to the state than some of us, he forgets that even Scott Jensen got dragged to the table a few times because of overwhelming pressure by the media and interest groups. Jensen was smart enough to manage and control the political damage, but anyone who was around in the mid to late 90's remembers how badly Republicans were pounded for dragging budgets well into the fall.
The media will crucify Republicans for starving government programs and refusing to come to the table. It might not be true, but that's the message you'll read in the paper every day. The interest groups will start flooding the opinion page, and conservatives will have no way to get their message out to regular people. Let's face it. Political blogs only matter because people in power pay too much attention to them. The average voter could care less what I think, or what Owen thinks.
Sorry, conservatives. Some of you might not like that, and frankly, I don't think it's good for the process either. But I assure you that it is what will happen. The media will take sides, the opinion pages will tilt against Republicans, and Democrats will start running counters of all the ways and all the days that Republican inaction is screwing over schoolkids, the elderly, the sick, the disabled.
This Gang of Nine, the nine who have signed Owen's petition, carries enough power that it probably has to be accommodated on some level, at least in the Assembly version of the budget. The problem is that in order to fulfill their demands, a lot of moderates and vulnerables are going to have to take an uncomfortable vote that will have to cut funding for a lot of popular programs.
Joe Wineke and the rest of the gang at DPW can't wait for people like Mary Williams, Karl Van Roy, Doc Hines, Brett Davis, and others to take a vote that slashes funding for schools, the elderly, and local governments when compared to the Doyle and JFC budgets. They will wait patiently. They will point out the disunity in the Assembly GOP. And every day, it's going to get a little bit worse.
Legislators are ultimately free to do as they wish. But what the Gang of Nine doesn't care about is the team. That much is for certain. And without the majority, you can't accomplish anything. You might be intellectually pure, but you are politically impotent. Those nine legislators, all in remarkably safe districts, have just put a dozen of their colleagues - colleagues who are in districts far more marginal than their own - in a terrible position. In pursuing their own self-serving agendas, they've sold their colleagues down the river.
Think Scott Jensen would've stood for this? Nope. There would be hell to pay behind closed doors for doing something so detrimental to the team. But now, nobody has any respect for the Assembly GOP leadership. Mike Huebsch is obviously the emperor without clothes. Hell, when you've got three freshmen signing some blogger pledge, you've got big problems.
Owen suggests that the reason to stake out a conservative position is to better position the team for the inevitable compromise that will be negotiated - the same way it is foolish to give a car dealer your best offer right away. Appealing, on a basic level.
But passing a budget is nothing like buying a car.
What Owen forgets is that if the GOP refuses to buy the new car because it costs too much, the wife (the media) will scream bloody murder until the husband (the GOP) slinks back to the dealer and buys it. She will withhold sex, she will turn the kids on dad, she will use every trick in the book to get rid of that junky old car in the driveway and replace it with a new model.
Owen thinks we need to do more to pander to the base? Screw the base! If I have to hear "what about the taxpayers?" one more time I'm going to vomit. This bitching and moaning from the base is just as bad as "what about the children?" The taxpayers of this state and country voted a bunch of Democrats into office last fall. Conservatives need to suck it up and deal. When you bellyache about the taxpayers, people just tune you out. You've gone to the well so many times with it that even when it's true, people are completely desensitized to it. You've taken a legitimate argument and turned it into a caricature of itself.
Need proof of how the base isn't as big as they want to believe they are? Look at the 2006 primary for lieutenant governor. Jean Hundertmark went all over the state campaigning. Nick Voegeli barely got off his living room couch. Hundertmark's margin of victory? 11 points. That's how much the base rewards the hard worker, the person who asks for their vote. And let's face it. With a legislative agenda that included a number of pro-life bills and the pharmacist's conscience clause bill, Hundertmark couldn't have been any more conservative. It got her 55% of the vote. That's it.
Way to go, base. Way to turn out. Way to prove your value.
When we're at 60 seats, that's the time for you to flex your muscles. When your idiocy costs us eight seats, it's time to sit down, shut up, and eat your vegetables.
Here's the message the Assembly GOP caucus needed to coalesce behind:
"Look, this budget is gonna suck. We're going to have some tough decisions and some heated arguments. But we need to work together to make it happen. That means no running to the press, no going off the reservation, no leaking stuff to the media, no pledges or resolutions or anything goofy. We can disagree, but your loyalty has to be to each other right now if we're going to hold on to the majority. Without the other people in this room, you can't get anything done."
But not surprisingly, the Gang of Nine have revealed what many of us have known for months: that the current attitude in the Assembly GOP majority is everybody for themselves. And it is that attitude that will lead to its demise, and not any failure to adhere to some ideological agenda pushed by a blogger.
The members of the Assembly GOP no longer believe they have any responsibility to each other. People sign up for goofy pledges because it allows them to posture back home. They don't think about how they're screwing over their colleagues. They don't think about how their myopic actions are actually greasing the skids and speeding up this trip into the minority.
And if there was real leadership in the Assembly GOP, they would've seen this coming and headed it off at the pass. Because I assure you, staffers and lobbyists all knew months ago that there would be a moment in the budget process when the Republican base would try to throw down the gauntlet and lay out the litmus test for whether or not you were a "real" Republican. That leadership couldn't address this ahead of time shows just how politically inept they are.
Oh, and one final note to leadership: you guys sat around and crapped your pants and called for my head when I started commenting on your sleeping and babysitting silliness 18 months ago. I wasn't even on your damn payroll. But you know who is? Those staffers who are spoonfeeding private conversations to Owen. You know, the ones who work for SE Wisconsin legislators, the ones who had zero Capitol experience when you let them in the door with their ragtag bosses.
Remember how Jensen used to screen all the staff hires? There was a reason for that. So congratulations on letting a bunch of people in the door who never understood the meaning of team in the first place. People who stand in the hallways and sit in their offices and talk about how they're going to work to recruit opponents for other members of the caucus if they don't sign the pledge or do this thing or that thing. You've got staffers who are more loyal to wingnut bloggers and the talking heads of WTMJ than to the other members of the team that make their jobs actually possible.
But you're not going to call for their heads, and why? Because you're a bunch of pussies. And everybody knows it. The Dems. Staffers. Lobbyists. Bloggers. Talking heads. Support staff. Lori the mail girl. Henry the janitor. Capitol Police. EVERYBODY.
Why don't you talk about that at your next worthless staff meeting. You know, the ones your staffers either don't go to or zone out during because they're all contemplating that job interview they have next week outside the building.
You are the sorriest damn excuses for leaders that the Republicans ever could've asked for. Along with your recently departed idiot of a friend John Gard, you are going to do undo in four years what took Scott Jensen 15 years to build.
And perhaps that's something people of all political stripes can agree on.
Way to go, bloggers.
But as usual, a conservative is badly miscalculating the politics of the situation because he is too vested in a particular, ideologically-driven outcome. This is often the problem with ideologues. Their allegiance to their convictions is so strong that they can't figure out how to build the coalitions necessary to get anything done.
At this point, nine Assembly Republicans have signed on to Owen's pledge, which basically allows him to subjectively determine by his own standards whether or not a budget contains fees that are used for the purpose of balancing the general fund. As we all know, money is fungible - so determining that in an absolute sense is nearly impossible.
In reading Owen's posts, there are clear flaws in both the logical and tactical reasoning he puts forward. Again, I admire his commitment to the cause. But there is a reason that when we make political predictions, I am generally right and he is generally wrong. I see the political world as it is. He is motivated by a desire to see particular policies implemented. After all, how else could someone pick Mark Green by 7, unless they believe that West Bend is somehow representative of reality?
First, the logical fallacy.
One of the principal arguments that TABOR supporters made for levy limits at the local level was that local governments were careless with taxpayer money, and that Wisconsinites couldn't be trusted to keep local governments in line because of their abysmal turnout rates in spring elections. When moderates argued for a state-only TABOR, conservatives balked and called them RINOs. "No," they said, "the state has to impose the limits on everyone."
Now, I've got Owen telling me that hey, some locals might raise property taxes through the roof, and that's okay because their constituents will sort it out in local elections. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that "most (local units of government) will be held back by their constituents."
So a few years ago, we couldn't be trusted to keep local governments in line without heavy-handed assistance from the state. Now, miraculously, we can. A few years ago, we were told not to trust the electoral process. Now, we're told we should.
I guess Mike Huebsch isn't the only one around here who wears two faces.
By Owen's new logic, a TABOR enacted at the state level for local governments was completely and totally unnecessary. But hey, when you're King of the Idiots, I guess you don't need to be consistent, because surely the lemmings aren't smart enough to demand it.
Now onto the politics.
Huebsch and Friends still need to pass some semblance of a budget out of the Assembly, and they're going to need 50 Republican votes to do it. I can assure you that Kreuser and Company are not going to allow their Democratic colleagues to stray on this. They want to watch the Republicans squirm. They want to see the Republicans put together something that they can use in hit pieces against vulnerable Republicans next fall.
Contrary to Owen's belief, Republicans can't just sit on the sideline and let state departments and programs run on continuation budgets. Perhaps because Owen is newer to the state than some of us, he forgets that even Scott Jensen got dragged to the table a few times because of overwhelming pressure by the media and interest groups. Jensen was smart enough to manage and control the political damage, but anyone who was around in the mid to late 90's remembers how badly Republicans were pounded for dragging budgets well into the fall.
The media will crucify Republicans for starving government programs and refusing to come to the table. It might not be true, but that's the message you'll read in the paper every day. The interest groups will start flooding the opinion page, and conservatives will have no way to get their message out to regular people. Let's face it. Political blogs only matter because people in power pay too much attention to them. The average voter could care less what I think, or what Owen thinks.
Sorry, conservatives. Some of you might not like that, and frankly, I don't think it's good for the process either. But I assure you that it is what will happen. The media will take sides, the opinion pages will tilt against Republicans, and Democrats will start running counters of all the ways and all the days that Republican inaction is screwing over schoolkids, the elderly, the sick, the disabled.
This Gang of Nine, the nine who have signed Owen's petition, carries enough power that it probably has to be accommodated on some level, at least in the Assembly version of the budget. The problem is that in order to fulfill their demands, a lot of moderates and vulnerables are going to have to take an uncomfortable vote that will have to cut funding for a lot of popular programs.
Joe Wineke and the rest of the gang at DPW can't wait for people like Mary Williams, Karl Van Roy, Doc Hines, Brett Davis, and others to take a vote that slashes funding for schools, the elderly, and local governments when compared to the Doyle and JFC budgets. They will wait patiently. They will point out the disunity in the Assembly GOP. And every day, it's going to get a little bit worse.
Legislators are ultimately free to do as they wish. But what the Gang of Nine doesn't care about is the team. That much is for certain. And without the majority, you can't accomplish anything. You might be intellectually pure, but you are politically impotent. Those nine legislators, all in remarkably safe districts, have just put a dozen of their colleagues - colleagues who are in districts far more marginal than their own - in a terrible position. In pursuing their own self-serving agendas, they've sold their colleagues down the river.
Think Scott Jensen would've stood for this? Nope. There would be hell to pay behind closed doors for doing something so detrimental to the team. But now, nobody has any respect for the Assembly GOP leadership. Mike Huebsch is obviously the emperor without clothes. Hell, when you've got three freshmen signing some blogger pledge, you've got big problems.
Owen suggests that the reason to stake out a conservative position is to better position the team for the inevitable compromise that will be negotiated - the same way it is foolish to give a car dealer your best offer right away. Appealing, on a basic level.
But passing a budget is nothing like buying a car.
What Owen forgets is that if the GOP refuses to buy the new car because it costs too much, the wife (the media) will scream bloody murder until the husband (the GOP) slinks back to the dealer and buys it. She will withhold sex, she will turn the kids on dad, she will use every trick in the book to get rid of that junky old car in the driveway and replace it with a new model.
Owen thinks we need to do more to pander to the base? Screw the base! If I have to hear "what about the taxpayers?" one more time I'm going to vomit. This bitching and moaning from the base is just as bad as "what about the children?" The taxpayers of this state and country voted a bunch of Democrats into office last fall. Conservatives need to suck it up and deal. When you bellyache about the taxpayers, people just tune you out. You've gone to the well so many times with it that even when it's true, people are completely desensitized to it. You've taken a legitimate argument and turned it into a caricature of itself.
Need proof of how the base isn't as big as they want to believe they are? Look at the 2006 primary for lieutenant governor. Jean Hundertmark went all over the state campaigning. Nick Voegeli barely got off his living room couch. Hundertmark's margin of victory? 11 points. That's how much the base rewards the hard worker, the person who asks for their vote. And let's face it. With a legislative agenda that included a number of pro-life bills and the pharmacist's conscience clause bill, Hundertmark couldn't have been any more conservative. It got her 55% of the vote. That's it.
Way to go, base. Way to turn out. Way to prove your value.
When we're at 60 seats, that's the time for you to flex your muscles. When your idiocy costs us eight seats, it's time to sit down, shut up, and eat your vegetables.
Here's the message the Assembly GOP caucus needed to coalesce behind:
"Look, this budget is gonna suck. We're going to have some tough decisions and some heated arguments. But we need to work together to make it happen. That means no running to the press, no going off the reservation, no leaking stuff to the media, no pledges or resolutions or anything goofy. We can disagree, but your loyalty has to be to each other right now if we're going to hold on to the majority. Without the other people in this room, you can't get anything done."
But not surprisingly, the Gang of Nine have revealed what many of us have known for months: that the current attitude in the Assembly GOP majority is everybody for themselves. And it is that attitude that will lead to its demise, and not any failure to adhere to some ideological agenda pushed by a blogger.
The members of the Assembly GOP no longer believe they have any responsibility to each other. People sign up for goofy pledges because it allows them to posture back home. They don't think about how they're screwing over their colleagues. They don't think about how their myopic actions are actually greasing the skids and speeding up this trip into the minority.
And if there was real leadership in the Assembly GOP, they would've seen this coming and headed it off at the pass. Because I assure you, staffers and lobbyists all knew months ago that there would be a moment in the budget process when the Republican base would try to throw down the gauntlet and lay out the litmus test for whether or not you were a "real" Republican. That leadership couldn't address this ahead of time shows just how politically inept they are.
Oh, and one final note to leadership: you guys sat around and crapped your pants and called for my head when I started commenting on your sleeping and babysitting silliness 18 months ago. I wasn't even on your damn payroll. But you know who is? Those staffers who are spoonfeeding private conversations to Owen. You know, the ones who work for SE Wisconsin legislators, the ones who had zero Capitol experience when you let them in the door with their ragtag bosses.
Remember how Jensen used to screen all the staff hires? There was a reason for that. So congratulations on letting a bunch of people in the door who never understood the meaning of team in the first place. People who stand in the hallways and sit in their offices and talk about how they're going to work to recruit opponents for other members of the caucus if they don't sign the pledge or do this thing or that thing. You've got staffers who are more loyal to wingnut bloggers and the talking heads of WTMJ than to the other members of the team that make their jobs actually possible.
But you're not going to call for their heads, and why? Because you're a bunch of pussies. And everybody knows it. The Dems. Staffers. Lobbyists. Bloggers. Talking heads. Support staff. Lori the mail girl. Henry the janitor. Capitol Police. EVERYBODY.
Why don't you talk about that at your next worthless staff meeting. You know, the ones your staffers either don't go to or zone out during because they're all contemplating that job interview they have next week outside the building.
You are the sorriest damn excuses for leaders that the Republicans ever could've asked for. Along with your recently departed idiot of a friend John Gard, you are going to do undo in four years what took Scott Jensen 15 years to build.
And perhaps that's something people of all political stripes can agree on.
3 comments:
The ideology is rather simple and it is consistent with the overall mood of the electorate. The voters do not want a tax increases, but they have given up on Republicans to protect them and for good reason. Republicans in Wisconsin have given themselves over to government spending.
You also misstate and misunderstand the TABOR/TPA battle. What was finally passed wasn’t a fraud because it only applied to the state, it was a fraud because the LFB analysis demonstrated that had it been in place for the last 20 years, it would have slowed the growth of spending by all of 2% - in other words, the version that was passed, did nothing.
As for the rest of the blathering about the evil conservatives, you misread the mood of the Republican base – and you have conveniently ignored them. That has been the problem with the Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature. The ones who continue to believe that talk radio thinks for people rather than understanding that talk radio reflects what people think.
You also misunderstand the message of Hundertmark. She couldn’t raise money, couldn’t foot a statewide campaign, was a shadow on the ticket and yes, just barely squeaked the primary out. It has nothing to do with her conservatism or her voting record, it was entirely based on an inability to build name-id. In her own Assembly District, where people knew her and her record, she polled 84% in the primary. That seems damn respectable to me. Those who knew her – liked her plenty.
This is not a conservative vs. moderate fight; this is a Republican vs. Party of Government fight. It is complete stupidity to make Republicans take responsibility for tax increases forced on them by Doyle and the Senate Democrats. What possible sense does it make to allow the Assembly Democrats to take a pass on their own Governor’s taxes? Do you think the freshman Democrats will be vulnerable in 2008 when they go back and tell their voters that they stood against tax increases? And what of the Republican Freshmen and vulnerables, do you really believe they will be well received in their district for passing a gas tax increase?
Your illogic is stunning.
You are correct about the “idiot John Gard,” I can’t argue with that. I would also concur about Jensen, but he would never have capitulated or walked in to conference waiving the white flag of tax increases.
Part of the problem for Huebsch is that he is willing to stand in front of the party faithful and claim he will stand against tax increases at the same time he is cutting deals behind closed doors to jack up taxes. That’s not very smart. As for folks like Brett Davis, he should be smart enough to know that talking tough on taxes and voting for them is a far stronger recipe for defeat than standing behind your own words.
I also find it peculiar that someone who loves Dick Armey so much could so misread the tea-leaves. I think you just want to see the train-wreck happen so you can say “I told you so.”
If you can find Republicans who ran on tax increases and increasing state spending 9%, then by all means, they should stand their ground and vote for a budget that jacks up taxes. Unfortunately, you cannot find them, because they do not exist, which proves the point. They all run talking just like Owen, and then they all want to govern acting like you.
Thanks for your commments. I'll try to go in order.
First off, I would argue that the electorate isn't really paying much attention to the budget right now, or much of anything. Very little has changed about the tenor of the discussion. You've still got an electorate that overwhelmingly dislikes the president and overwhelmingly opposes our involvement in Iraq. I'm not sure much else is resonating right now, though I will say (as I have said before) that the Republicans' general unwillingness to cultivate a sellable message out of "me want lower taxes" is problematic in an increasingly diversified electorate.
It's not a bad message, and I will concur with you that much of the problem with that message is that people like Mike Huebsch are clearly in the "say one thing, do another" camp. One could argue that his own inconsistency has been a source of much of the current trouble. How can the team know what the message is when its leader is contradicting himself?
My argument regarding TABOR has nothing to do with the final product. The final product was a total joke, I think we'd both agree on that. The process was so bungled and so much had been given away that what was finally passed was something that everyone hated.
My argument has to do with the fact that two years ago, conservatives were telling me I couldn't be trusted to regulate my local officials, and now a conservative is loudly proclaiming how we should allow property tax limits to lapse because voters can be trusted to regulate their local officials.
Fact is, conservatives can't figure out if they trust local government or not, and this is greatly problematic for a party that, for decades, always emphasized the importance of local control and "the government that governs best governs closest to home."
Hundertmark was a joke, but my point still stands. She did the convention, she was plenty loyal, she sponsored the right bills, the party activists all knew who she was, and it hardly mattered anyway. What that says to me is that there are a lot of people voting in the Republican primary who aren't active and who can hardly be considered plugged in.
The problem with the Doyle budget is that it's got plenty of boutique goodness that most voters will relegate the overall cost to secondary consideration. There's stuff for the working poor, stuff for middle class families concerned about the cost of college, stuff for the elderly, stuff for public schools. People will be okay with the oil tax because people (wrongly) believe that it's Republican-inspired greed that's causing that problem anyway. As long as Doyle mixes in the requisite middle-class tax cuts, most voters are going to give it all a pass and figure that someone else is paying for most of it.
Republicans, to get to a zero-increase budget, are going to have to cut, and the things they cut will be the sort of things that piss off people in the middle.
To Doyle's credit, he proposed a budget that at least makes strides to pay for everything it promises. This has been a bipartisan problem for ages, and Doyle's budget does come closer.
Wisconsin has to recognize that you can't borrow and push off to pay for all of this stuff. And so perhaps this is the budget where that finally starts to come to a head. To support our current level of government, taxes have to go up. So you can either cut programs or find ways to raise the revenue.
Of course I want the train wreck to happen. The train wreck has to happen for this party to fix its problems. The party has no effective leaders right now. Scott Jensen, for as bright as he was, never bothered to cultivate a successor.
And Jensen compromised plenty on matters of government spending. Thumb through a copy of the 1999 or 2001 budget sometime and see what you find. Taxation wasn't such an issue because during his tenure as Speaker, the state was largely running surpluses - and a hell of a lot more of that got spent than returned to the taxpayers.
I think we can both agree that the Assembly GOP leadership has created an interesting conundrum for itself, and it will certainly be interesting to watch them look for a way out of the corner into which they have painted themselves.
Thanks again for commenting.
- RS
The state will take in over $1 billion in new revenue with existing taxes and there are hundreds of small cuts that can and should be made as well as a few big targets.
It is time for Republicans to read their own audit reports and start trimming and eliminating unproductive business grants. It would be really nice if they would actually focus on trimming DOA too.
Zero should not be the target in this budget - priorities must be funded.
Education and local aids must be a priority. They also need to put in place a plan to repair the damage they did to the transportation fund instead of standing there like a bunch of dolts wondering who robbed the piggy bank and dancing with gas tax increases.
It can be done, but it can't be done by a bunch of lazy; hapless clowns who can’t say know to every piece of pork with a tear that is put on their plate by LFB.
And it cannot be done by a group who has already resigned themselves to accepting tax increases.
Government spending is not bad, wasteful government spending is, spending money you don’t have is also bad, and certainly taking a larger and larger share of peoples income is very bad. It is also insane to pretend that you have no choice when you will not work to slow down the spending or find ways to pay for the programs that you have been paying for over the years with one-time money.
And no, Doyle is not actually paying for programs in this budget, he is still proposing things like the bed tax and hospital tax with dubious matching federal money and he is funding new programs with revenue streams that will decline – the cigarette tax.
Finally, the train wreck, will not fix the party. Going in to the minority will not be a short-term event. If it happens, Republicans will be out of power for at least a decade, probably longer. That is not a solution.
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