Wisconsin Wednesday: Where's the Democracy?

Bill Christofferson has been on a tear lately at the Xoff Files (I wonder how long until he gets in trouble for "taking the Christ out of Christofferson"?). One that you all need to read is Monday's No Sunshine on the Budget. Even if you're one of them Republicans (and I imagine there are a couple of you among my five or six regular readers), this should disturb you (my bold, his italics):

Well, how many state budget decisions do you suppose got made over the weekend? No, the legislature wasn't in session, and the Joint Finance Committee wasn't meeting. But the first batch of budget decisions were quietly being made on conference calls between Republican leaders in the Senate and Assembly and co-chairs of Joint Finance. It wouldn't be surprising if the call also included Finance member Scott Jensen and maybe a few more key players.

How do we know that? Because Assembly Co-Chair Dean Kaufert said so. This from the WisPolitics weekly report on Friday:

Kaufert expects conference calls between caucus leaders and JFC members over the weekend to start nailing down some of the issues. "I think by Monday some of those decisions between the Senate and Assembly are going to start falling into place. We've got to have both sides to dance, and until we are in agreement, neither house is going to go out there too far on any of these.''

Joint Finance has had no public debate by its members on any budget items yet, although it has held public hearings and had briefings by agencies.

Voting by Joint Finance is supposed to begin on Thursday. How, you might wonder, will the committee vote on the dozens, if not hundreds, of motions if members haven't discussed them? [. . .]

Is this legal? Technically, maybe [. . .]. But does it meet the intent of state open meetings laws? Of course not. It flunks the smell test and may even flunk the legal test if someone [. . .] were to apply it.

So, are we clear? John Gard (R Sun Prairie Peshtigo) and his indicted cronies get on the phone to each other and make their budget decisions completely in the dark. What are they afraid of? What are they hiding? Or are they just too drunk on their own power to consider that maybe, in a democracy (representative though we may be), the people have a right to know?

By the way, I fully expect (read: it will be a cold day in hell if) Frank Lasee to condemn this. Remember, his TABOR bill is all about stopping unconscionable legislators from making these kinds of decisions, especially in secret. Lasee wants most of these decisions moved to referrenda, in fact. So, Frank, what do you say? And my Republican readers?