State Senate Doing Its Job, State Assembly Playing Its Games

In every organization, there are essentially two kinds of people.

The workers and the game-players. You all have seen them at work and at play.

That bright dividing line is visible these days in the state legislature.

Despite objections from some Republicans, the Great Lakes Compact bill was approved 3-2 in the Senate Energy and Environment Committee Wednesday.

Twenty-eight months after the agreement was signed in Milwaukee by eight Great Lakes Governors and two Canadian provincial premiers.

After negotiations to produce it began in 2001.

It could have a floor vote Thursday, where it should pass with some Republican votes, though the Democrats control the Senate.

On this issue, bi-partisanship is crucial.

But don't break out the champagne.

The effort to approve this historic Great Lakes management procedure, and to achieve genuine water conservation across a large portion of North America moves to the Assembly...to die.

So much for Great Lakes water preservation.

It will die in the Assembly this session - - though do not rule out a special session where, frankly, anything could happen.

But it will stop in the Assembly in a matter of hours or days because GOP leaders in the lower house have said they will take up an alternative with just a few so-called 'minor tweaks' - - in actuality huge changes that the State Senate will not approve - - that undermine the entire, seven-year negotiating and agreement-writing process, and weaken the agreement's conservation protections and goals, too.

The Assembly substitute is going nowhere. The leadership there knows it, but this is what their financiers in the state's major trade and business organizations want, and that is what the Assembly leadership will do.

Their game-playing will rightly be dismissed as obstructionist and intellectually, if not politically and procedurally dishonest, by the four Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces - - because their legislatures have already approved Compact bills that came directly out of the long, bi-partisan and regional negotiating process.

Some information is here about who is playing these partisan, off-note games in Wisconsin, with an assist from some state's rights anachronoids in Ohio.

Game-players or workers.

Who do you want making water policy in Wisconsin?