Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne sued the Wisconsin legislature over the passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, citing government transparency issues. He argued that a legislative committee did not post proper notice of its meeting before voting on the legislation.

“Transparency in government is of the utmost importance. It’s the foundation that builds communities trust in representatives and government,” Ozanne was quoted as saying at the time.

But Ozanne does not operate his own office by those same standards.

Several weeks ago, Education Action Group submitted two Open Records requests – to Ozanne and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk – seeking copies of their email communications that pertained to their efforts to block the budget repair bill.
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Emails obtained through the Wisconsin Open Records law indicate former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk emailed all county employees and circuit court judges, including Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi, with a memo announcing her intention to file suit against Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.

In response, Falk received three responses from court employees.  Kathy Melzer and Elaine Creager responded with encouraging notes.  Peter Anderson replied with “doubts about the appropriateness of sending a message about filing a legal action to the judges of the circuit court where the action is likely to be filed.”

Anderson is Sumi’s colleague on the bench.  He’s a judge who felt it was inappropriate to give the judges a heads-up that this lawsuit was coming.

There was no similar statement from Sumi.  Instead, with this knowledge in hand, she moved quickly to agree with Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne’s suit to void the budget repair law.

Was this all a set up from the beginning?

The end result, of course, was that Sumi’s ruling was ridiculous and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported, “The court concluded that Sumi exceeded her jurisdiction, ‘invaded’ the Legislature’s constitutional powers and erred in halting the publication and implementation of the collective bargaining law.”  The Supreme Court reinstated the budget repair legislation, including the curtailment of collective bargaining privileges.

Ozanne was quoted by the AP as saying, “We’ve done the best we can…it looks like we’ve lost.”

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Public school officials throughout Wisconsin can move ahead with plans to minimize the impact of pending cuts in state aid, now that the state Supreme Court has dismissed a lower court’s restraining order preventing Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill from becoming law.

Walker’s law severely limits the scope of teachers union collective bargaining in public schools. That was necessary because labor costs, largely tied to collective bargaining agreements, had been dominating school budgets for several years. And union officials around the state had displayed little willingness to accept contract concessions to help school districts save money.

Under the new law, the unions will have no power to interfere with school boards as they unilaterally eliminate labor costs and dedicate the savings to student needs. School boards will be able to dump many labor perks, like automatic annual salary increases for teachers, without laying off as many teachers or cancelling student programs.

Labor officials are accusing Gov. Walker and the legislature of attacking public education by cutting state aid to schools. But by limiting collective bargaining, the Republicans gave local school boards the tools they need to blunt the impact of state budget cuts and meet their basic responsibilities to students.

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Public sector unions moved rapidly this year to teach Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker a lesson for his “attack” on collective bargaining.  Massive protests gained national attention for weeks.  Out-of-state notables like AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka and filmmaker Michael Moore grandstanded.

Teachers called in sick, abusing policies without being held accountable.  State employees, organized by AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers, were also activated to create a maximum amount of noise.

One AFT-Wisconsin leader, Department of Workforce Development employee William Franks, has been particularly vocal in his advocacy for a public employee strike.  From The Progressive:

“You’ve got to make hay when sun shines, and we soon will be paying the price for not making hay. We blinked,” says Bill Franks, a senior steward for AFT-Wisconsin. “It was a lost opportunity. We had to shut this motherfucker down.” (AFT-Wisconsin was formerly the American Federation of Teachers of Wisconsin, but it has broadened its membership to include other professionals).

Franks believes that when organized labor had 100,000 people marching in the streets, it should have called for some direct action and possibly a general strike. “You can’t put 100,000 people in jail,” he says. “When you have those numbers, the math is all of a sudden on your side.”

Given Franks’ clarity on the issue – and the fact that his union has his taxpayer-funded email address on its website (where he is a steward) – Education Action Group submitted an Open Records request for Franks’ communications involving the words “strike, Maddow, Madison, Walker” and “AFT.”

All the communications can be found here.

One in particular jumped out at us.

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The public has a right to know who or what is influencing its government.  Open Records and Freedom of Information laws are critical to ensuring a transparent and accountable government.  Taxpayers deserve to know how their hard-earned money is being spent.  And we ought to know who is massaging legislation or prodding elected officials’ actions.

That’s why Education Action Group, a Michigan-based national education reform organization, submitted an Open Records request to Dane County (Wisconsin) District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to obtain any and all communications he had surrounding litigation to block Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.

A district attorney traditionally focuses on crime at the local level.  EAG saw it as highly unusual that a DA would seek to block – and effectively void – an action by a state legislature.  Who or what pushed him to do this?

Is he the Mr. Washington of Wisconsin?  Or did Big Labor urge him and work with him to block the necessary reform?

It’s EAG’s intention to find out and we’re serious about it.  That’s why we hired Paul Bucher, a Wisconsin lawyer who himself was a district attorney for 27 years.  In addition to Ozanne, EAG is also seeking communications of Dane County Executive Kathleen M. Falk, who also filed suit to block the law from taking effect.

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On April 5, Wisconsinites will go to the poll to pick a new supreme court justice. The election has gained prominence because many political analysts believe the Budget Repair Bill may one day end up before the high court. Throughout the campaign, challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg has claimed she is politically unbiased and impartial. However analysis of her political history, donations and comments have called that into question. Now Media Trackers has learned that Kloppenburg accepted a campaign donation from the husband of Judge Maryann Sumi, the judge who caused a firestorm of controversy by blocking Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill.

Additionally, Sumi’s husband, Carl Sinderbrand, an environmental lawyer, also represents a party in a pending case in which Kloppenburg is defending the other side – the state DNR.

Underscoring the growing ties between her campaign and attempts to stop Walker’s agenda, Kloppenburg’s campaign website boasts an endorsement from a vocal member of the “Wisconsin 14” – one of the Democratic senators who fled the state, Sen. Chris Larson.

According to Wispolitics.com, Kloppenburg said during a debate with incumbent David Prosser this week that “she also wouldn’t need to recuse herself from any cases on the collective bargaining bill because she has remained independent during the protests in Madison.”

However, the donation from Sumi’s husband raises serious questions as to whether Kloppenburg, if victorious, could even hear the state Attorney General’s challenge to Sumi’s ruling, which could eventually reach the state Supreme Court.

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The ruling on Friday by a liberal Dane County judge to block Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill was “an assault on the judiciary and the legislature.” The legal argument challenge was, in fact, so weak that it bordered on frivolous… and local MSM coverage has been absurdly uninformed. What happened is that an activist judge ignored the clear language of the state statutes, the state constitution, legislative rules, and Supreme Court precedencts to hand the unions a victory. It’s all breath-taking stuff.

Judge MaryAnn Sumi

Don’t take my word for it. This is an analysis written by Ellen Nowak, the former legal counsel and chief of staff to the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker:

Try again?

The fallacies in the ruling by Dane County Judge MaryAnn Sumi to issue a temporary restraining order against the publication of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, referred to as the Budget Repair Bill, are perpetuated by the misrepresentations of facts and the law in the editorial in the Journal Sentinel on Saturday, March 19 (“To GOP: Try again”).

Both Judge Sumi and the Journal Sentinel ignored the law when rendering opinions on whether the Budget Repair Bill was properly noticed before a conference committee vote.

This wasteful exercise of legal maneuvering by the Democrats reminds me of a saying in politics: when you can’t win on the merits, argue procedure.

A disagreement with the underlying bill does not authorize one to ignore the law. Unfortunately, that was done here. The Democrats argue that the conference committee violated the open meetings law by not allowing enough time from the notice of the meeting until the vote. Judge Sumi and the Journal Sentinel bought that argument hook, line and sinker.

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