Liberal Groups Demand Evers Veto Budget

Robert Kraig of Citizen Action at the podium in the Senate parlor in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday, May 27 , surrounded by representatives of other grassroots groups | Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

More than 100 citizens from an array of grassroots groups packed the Wisconsin state Senate parlor and marched on Gov. Tony Evers’ office Tuesday, their chants bouncing off the marble walls inside the Capitol. They were there to deliver a letter — which they urged others to sign online — demanding that Evers veto the state budget if it doesn’t include key elements of the governor’s own budget proposal.

“The whole Democratic grassroots is now demanding that national leaders stand and fight,” said Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, who helped organize the effort, “and I think that spirit is now being translated down to the state level.”

Public school advocates, child care providers, teachers’ unions and advocates for criminal justice reform and health care access came to demand that Evers take a stronger stand and threaten to use his significant veto power in negotiations with Republicans.

“There has been a lot of talk over the last year about whether or not we can get this done as adults, or whether we have to be impolite,” Michael Jones, president of Madison Teachers, Inc., said of state budget negotiations. “Too much gets conceded about being polite,” he added. “Politeness without reciprocal respect is just being a sucker.”

In their letter, the advocates assured Evers that Wisconsinites were behind his original budget proposal — the one Republican legislative leaders threw in the trash. The advocates urged him to “hold the line” and reject any budget that doesn’t accept federal Medicaid expansion money, provide a 60% state reimbursement to schools for special education costs, close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, restore his proposed $480 million for child care and reject the snowballing growth of school vouchers.

Brooke Legler, a child care provider and co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (W.E.C.A.N.), has been leading a recent high-profile effort to sound the alarm about the loss of child care funds. “So many of us are going to be closing our doors because we cannot keep going and parents can’t afford to pay what they are paying,” she said during a press conference in the Senate parlor. Treating child care like any other business doesn’t work, she added. Instead, it needs to be seen as a public good. “Gov. Evers declared this the year of the kid,” Legler said, but “it’s not going to be” if Evers signs a budget that leaves out crucial funding for child care.

Tanya Atkinson of Planned Parenthood Wisconsin spoke at the press conference about congressional Republicans’ effort to cancel Medicaid funding for patient care at Planned Parenthood.

In Wisconsin, 60% of Planned Parenthood’s patients have Medicaid as their form of insurance, she said. Most of them live in rural areas, are low-income, or are women of color who “continue to be further pushed out of our health care system,” Atkinson said. “And it doesn’t have to be that way. It is time for us to take the politics out of sexual reproductive health altogether.”

Atkinson and the other assembled advocates praised Evers’ budget proposal, including the part that would finally allow Wisconsin to join the 40 other states that have accepted the federal Medicaid expansion, making 90,000 more Wisconsinites eligible for Medicaid coverage and bringing about $1.5 billion into the state in the next budget cycle.

Shaniya Cooper, a college student from Milwaukee and a BadgerCare recipient who lives with lupus, talked about how scary it was to realize she could lose her Medicaid coverage under congressional Republicans’ budget plan. “To me, this is life or death,” she said. When she first learned about proposed Medicaid cuts, “I cried,” she said. “I felt fear and dread.”

She described having a flare-up of her lupus, with swelling and fluid around her heart, and then finding out she had to fill out paperwork to reapply for Medicaid, since it was unclear if her treatment would still be covered.

“It isn’t just about the paperwork. It’s about waking up each day with the fear that the care I might need might be gone tomorrow,” she said, “It’s about knowing that people are quietly suffering mentally and emotionally from the stress and the anxiety that these policies are creating.” Her voice broke and people around her yelled encouragement. “You got this!” someone shouted. “What’s at stake here is humanity,” she continued, “and if we do nothing, we allow these cuts to happen, we are silently endorsing the neglect and slow death of those who cannot afford prime insurance. That is not a civil society. That is not justice.”

“We are here because we will not be pitted against each other to fight for crumbs in a time of plenty,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network. “We will not be divided on the issues that matter most where we live, because some people refuse to listen to us.”

DuBois Bourenane derided what she called a “cycle of disinvestment, first of all, but it’s also a cycle of disrespect,” by Republicans who dismissed Evers’ budget proposals despite overwhelming public support. Increasing funding for schools, expanding Medicaid coverage and reforming the criminal justice system by closing prisons and reducing incarceration are popular measures. “Gov. Evers has the power, with his veto pen, to break [the cycle],” she said, “and we’re calling on him to use the full force, the full power of that pen, to say, enough is enough. It stops with me.”

“There’s a tremendous amount of Democratic leverage in this budget, if you consider both the number of Democratic members in the Senate and the veto,” Kraig said.

“These are groups with large memberships calling on the governor to stand and fight,” he added.

Evers did not make an appearance or respond to the rowdy group at the Capitol. But it was clear they have no intention of going away quietly.

Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner

Grassroots pressure on Gov. Evers reflects nationwide impatience with Dems was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.