Policy items added to Assembly GOP budget
Much like Senate Dems loaded up their version of the budget with pork, Assembly Republicans have filled theirs with policy.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau analysis released today on the Assembly GOP package points out dozens of policy items in the document, many of them based on various bills that have languished in a Legislature featuring split control.
The items include everything from requiring legislative approval for off-reservation casinos, some things Republicans have been trying to pass for the last four years, to the elimination of straight ticket voting, which some Republicans believe hurt them at the polls last fall in the Dem wave that swept the country.
Here are some examples of the policy items in the document:
-Require school district referenda to be held on regularly scheduled primary or general election dates.
-Changing state law to require schools to meet a set number of hours rather than at least 180 days annually.
-Allow schools to refuse to hire felons or to fire them.
-Allow employers to refuse to employ or terminate anyone convicted of a sex offense or a violent offense.
-Eliminate the residency requirement for Milwaukee Public School teachers.
-Create an exception to quotas on "Class B" liquor licenses for full-service restaurants.
-Require proof of citizenship to qualify for public assistance "to the extent permitted under federal law."
-Require child sex offenders who are required to be monitored through GPS tracking to have license plates on their vehicles with a chartreuse-colored background.
-Eliminate sick leave for legislators, justices and judges, and all other state elected officials.
-Change requirements for local governments on posting legal notices, ordinances, rules and orders.
-Prohibiting prisoners from initiating a John Doe proceeding by complaining to judges that a crime may have been committed. Prisoners would only be allowed to complain to district attorneys.
-Alter state laws on the self-defense privilege.
-Allow electors to require identification whenever a ballot is issued under their name.
-Prohibit Milwaukee from printing more than 200 percent of the ballots used in the previous election for the next one.
-Allow an authority as defined under the state's Open Records Law to withhold access to any record containing a utility security system plan under certain circumstances.
-Create a legislative Joint Committee on State Mandates.
-Modify the regulation of elevators.
-Eliminate the ban on heated exterior pedestrian walkways not fully enclosed within a building, which has been in existence since 1980.
Republicans put together a list of Dem earmarks after the Senate finished its version of the budget. See the list:
http://www.wispolitics.com/1006/Budget___Senate_Democrat_Earmarks.pdf
