In light of the disaster of the last state budget, which took 115 days over its allotted time to become law, state Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, and state Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, have removed roughly half of the nonfiscal items from this year's budget proposal to make it more palatable from a bipartisan perspective. As the chairs of the Joint Committee on Finance, Miller and Pocan removed some nonfiscal items to be introduced in separate bills, leaving some non-fiscal items on the budget for the state Legislature to deliberate on.
Although The Daily Cardinal Editorial Board may support the nonfiscal items left on the budget, the sneaky method of including items that have absolutely nothing to do with the budget, trailing the meat of the legislation like pilot fish on a shark, should be banished altogether.
The democratic process of passing legislation has unfortunate loopholes where extraneous items can be placed within a bill, and it's not a new realization to politics: Almost every major federal bill is earmarked with special interests and unrelated items. Removing some of these items from the state budget is a start to the purification of legislation, but removing all should be the ultimate goal.
Included in the items left on the budget is a statewide smoking ban, which this editorial board thoroughly supports. The problem is, if such legislation would not pass regularly, then snaking it through as an item in the budget is inherently wrong and undemocratic. However, this will likely not be the last time nonfiscal items will be placed in the budget.
In the interest of preserving the democratic process as well as making the budget a more palatable bill, every nonfiscal budget item should be removed and introduced separately. Although items such as the smoking ban are important, their expediency is not as vital as the state budget, especially considering the last budget stalled for so long.
