Two years later, my concerns remain as strong as ever. Shankland, who is entering her second term in office, was recently elected by the Democratic Assembly Caucus to be the assistant minority leader. Apparently, her first order of business is to acquiesce to the Republicans:
I think the key here is managing relationships and building coalitions, so my goal is to sit down with everyone in the Assembly. There have been a lot of talks about how ‘green’ the Assembly is. Over half of us haven’t even been through Act 10 anymore. I think, personally, that’s positive. That means while we lack institutional knowledge, we also have tremendous motivation to build personal relationships and work across the aisle. I see that potential in the new members as well as the current freshman caucuses … so my goal is to help facilitate that conversation.Oh, yay!
I also am really looking forward to sitting down with every member of leadership, especially in the Republican caucus, talking about priorities and picking their brains seeing where we can work together. There are so many nonpartisan issues in this state. I wish that education were considered nonpartisan. It is not, unfortunately, because of the voucher expansion lobby. I wish that our natural resources and preserving our natural resources were less partisan. I’ll be fighting very hard for that. But I think there are other issues. Protecting women and ensuring that domestic violence is being curbed and we’re finding good plans to help domestic abuse victims is one example where I think we can work together. And we’ve seen that. We passed mental health and heroin packages in the last session. Every kind of corner or angle I can see, I want to capitalize on and make sure that Democrats can advance an agenda that is reflective of what the people of Wisconsin want and that starts by finding ways to work together.
You know who else likes to work with the Republicans? The sellout senator, Lena Taylor.
Thanks to Taylor's "bipartisanship," we have a number of unhealthy laws in the books, including, but in no way limited to:
- The mining bill
- Concealed carry and the Castle Doctrine
- The privatization and profiteering of the school system.
- The decimation of representative government in Milwaukee County.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
How is she going to compromise with people that want to ruin the state ten times over? By making them settle for ruining it only seven times over?
It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that the Democrats have a messaging problem. I think their problems go much deeper than that. They have a spinal fortitude deficiency.