Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Negotiating With the Sandman

Looks like the budget negotiations are going as expected.

• Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) didn’t waste the hours he spent observing the eight leaders who are supposed to be negotiating a final state budget, which is two months overdue. Carpenter signed hundreds of year-end holiday greeting cards that will be mailed to his constituents or dropped off at their doors.

• Because the final budget deal will be between Assembly Republicans and Senate Democrats, the lone Senate Republican is a sort of Maytag-repairman figure. That’s why Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Berlin) had to visibly fight to stay awake, and didn’t say a word, during his one day as a negotiator.

• Olsen hasn’t been the only one fighting to stay awake this summer. Green- and blue-shirted activists for large unions of state workers attend each meeting of the conference committee to symbolically argue for their programs, jobs and pay raises; on Thursday, four of them were dozing within the first 15 minutes of the meeting.

• At two meetings, Republican leaders looked around for any senior aide to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and, when they didn’t see any Doyle aide capable of speaking for the governor, wondered whether they all weren’t just wasting their time.

• Lobbyists who normally pack serious budget deliberations skipped the meetings. With the word out that no real deals were being cut yet, they had better things to do.

(1) Comments
Posted by Owen at 0711 hrs
Politics + Politics - Wisconsin

  1. Gridlock - it’s a beautiful thing.

    Posted by steveegg on September 05, 2007 at 1351 hrs


Commenting is not available in this channel entry.