Advisory referendum is a waste of time and money

What is old, it appears, is new again.

On April 25, 1996, Gov. Tommy Thompson signed into law “Wisconsin Works” or W2 as it became known. It was a comprehensive welfare reform measure that made working, or at least searching for work, an essential component of benefiting from social safety nets.

The measure was passed by playing off of the persistent conservative fantasy that the poor are poor because they are lazy and that there are large numbers of otherwise able-bodied and employable people who are just refusing to work and who are living off the public dole — seasoned, with more than a dash of racism and sexism.

Let’s ignore that W2 has created cliffs where people in the system are forced between losing access to healthcare, housing, and childcare and taking that promotion or those extra hours when offered. Or let us ignore the plight of those who legitimately are unable to work due to medical conditions including mental health issues or the negative impacts to employers and workplaces of forcing the unemployable into employment.

For the past two and a half decades, Wisconsin Works has been the law of the land with the move over the intervening time being, if anything, to take a firmer stand against those freeloading poor people.

Fast forward to the present day with legislative leaders planning to milk the bugaboo of “welfare moms” yet again in an attempt to get the conservative base riled up to come out to the April election this spring in hopes that while they are there they will vote to keep the current conservative majority on the State Supreme Court.

Rolling out the tired trope of picking on poor people, is a pathetic attempt on behalf of legislative leaders to introduce a red herring issue into the election. Not only is forcing an advisory referendum that will have all the political weight of a wet paper bag, a waste of taxpayer resources, it insults the intelligence of conservative voters.

There are plenty of reasons why people on both sides of the political aisle should be paying attention to the Supreme Court race. The decisions of the next court will have long-lasting implications for Wisconsin residents and the political power structure for years to come.

Rather than taking a page out of some national playbook for riling up the voters with non-issues, legislative leaders need to pay attention to what matters in Wisconsin, and not just what national polling data finds to be hot button topics for deep-pocketed donors.

The Wisconsin legislature needs to stop wasting taxpayer dollars on political stunts such as putting an advisory referendum on forcing welfare recipients to have to work on the April ballot. Rightly or wrongly, this issue was solved in Wisconsin more than two decades ago under Gov. Tommy Thompson and his system-wide overhaul.