Who's to say who did that thing?
The background: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got himself into some very hot water recently when he released in his latest budget effort a plan to erase the famous
Wisconsin Idea from the University of Wisconsin System's mission statement as part of an effort to separate the university system from state government in a way that would allow the state to, of course, cut its funding. This proposal to gut one of the best things Wisconsin ever did went poorly, and went even worse when Walker claimed it was all some sort of unintentional mix-up, oops, only to have documents uncovered that showed Walker's office was in fact perfectly aware of the changes. This was quickly followed by lawsuits demanding the release of administration documents related to the change, since Walker seems to have been caught in (yet another) huge lie about what his office was or wasn't doing. Walker says nothing doing, because those count as "deliberative" and he shouldn't have to release documents from his administration showing how members of his administration
deliberated on the changes.
Got that? Fast forward to this weekend, when the Republican-controlled legislature's Joint Finance Committee:
abruptly introduced and passed new exemptions to the open records law — including a broad provision that would explicitly create an exception for "deliberative materials." Such an exception would make it impossible for the public to see how state, local and school officials made their decisions. [...]
The public reaction was swift, with groups on the left and right decrying the attempt to stifle the public's access to government records. By Saturday, Walker and legislative leaders announced they were abandoning the plan, while continuing to evade saying who pushed for the idea in the first place.
In other words, Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans responded to controversy over how and why an amazingly cynical and ham-handed and unpopular proposal "accidentally" found its way into the state budget by passing a new bill saying Scott Walker was released from having to disclose who exactly wanted that thing. And when that amazingly cynical and ham-handed and unpopular bill generated so much backlash that Walker was forced to distance himself from it only two days later, lo and behold, nobody's quite sure who among them wanted that new now-admittedly-horrible idea in the first place.
Ah, but we have not yet reached the end point in the Scott Walker Cycle. The end point of the cycle is when Scott Walker proposes an endlessly cynical and unpopular thing, then is forced to distance himself from it after it becomes a legislative diaper bomb, then cannot fathom who originally came up with that terrible idea, then continues to do that very thing anyway as matter of administrative policy.
While Walker says he's opposing the change in records policy, he isn't altering his claim that he can withhold documents that reflect internal deliberations.
One of his claims is that since the discussions include "non-final" proposals, possibly including shutting all college campuses and turning them into enormous new monster truck stadiums, releasing those documents would "confuse" the public.
In their arguments to the Journal Sentinel and others, attorneys for Walker didn't cite any state court cases to back their contention when they could withhold such records. Instead, they said they could hold back the records under a long-standing balancing test that allows them to determine whether the public benefit of withholding records outweigh the public benefit of releasing them.
Is there a public benefit to determining whether Scott Walker once again lied his keister off about how certain of his office's most radical policies came into being? Perhaps, but it's clearly outweighed by the private benefit to presidential candidate Scott Walker if the public is never able to find out.