Voters must demand accountability on lawsuit spending

Last week, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that the Republican-controlled legislature has spent $8.5 million of taxpayer money over the past three years on lawsuits against other branches of the state government. The report came at the request of Democratic members of the state’s joint finance committee.

The lawsuits in the report covered a range of topics, from defending gerrymandered voting maps to suing to end COVID-19 orders and remove pandemic voting protections. Beyond the merits, or lack of them, of any of these politically- tinged cases, is the process by which large amounts of taxpayer money are being spent and the shocking lack of accountability at the most basic level of government.

Representative democracy works by having voters elect people to make decisions on their behalf. Depending on your philosophical leaning, you may view legislators as being beholden to represent what they feel the majority of their constituents support or that they are elected to make their own decisions based on the information they are provided. In either case, there is a vital component of accountability.

A representative who votes against the will of their constituents on a regular basis will soon find themselves voted out of office. This is why accountability and transparency in government are so vital regardless of political party.

Before the state legislature uses taxpayer money to hire outside attorneys and launch a lawsuit, members of the legislature should be called on to vote on if that is the best use of taxpayer resources. Under the current system, lawsuit decisions are made by party leadership and more often than not by assembly speaker Robin Vos’ constituency of one.

The issue is not about if the lawsuits had merit or if pumping millions of dollars of taxpayer resources into the pockets of private law firms was the best use of those dollars, but rather one of personal accountability on behalf of the 99 members of the state assembly and 33 state senators.

These elected officials have never been given the opportunity to go on record with a “yea” or “nay” vote that they can then defend when questioned by their local voters.

Robbing legislators of the opportunity to go on record either in support of or against spending millions of dollars in hiring outside attorneys, likewise robs voters of the ability to hold their elected officials accountable. At its most fundamental level democracy cannot exist without full accountability.

Wisconsin voters must demand that their elected officials exercise their right and responsibility to go on the record either in support of or opposed to spending taxpayer dollars on political lawsuits regardless of which party is in power at the time.

Decisions to hire attorneys and file lawsuits against other branches of the state government should be made by a vote of the full legislature so that voters can know how their legislator voted.