Lame duck session includes changes to LIRC

As there is now some time to review what has been happening with the lame duck session, there are more and more changes to figure out. Some of these changes are at the Labor and Industry Review Commission and involve the three Commissioners there.

Prior to the lame duck session, Georgia Maxwell’s appointment expired in March 2019, Dave Falstad’s appointment expired in 2021, and Laurie McCallum’s appointment expired in 2023.

NOTE: Falstad was appointed in 2015. McCallum was appointed in 2011 and then again in 2017. Bill Jordahl was appointed in 2013 for a term expiring in 2019. When he left LIRC in 2017 (when Gov. Walker proposed eliminating the Commission) for the Public Service Commission, Maxwell replaced him.

But, Laurie McCallum has indicated she is retiring from the Commission in very early January 2019. So, Gov. Walker apparently proposed and the Senate approved on Dec. 4th to appoint Maxwell to fill the remainder of McCallum’s term:

Executive Appointment: Maxwell, Georgia – Georgia E. Maxwell, of Madison, as Commissioner of the Labor and Industry Review Commission, to serve for the term effective January 6, 2019 and ending March 1, 2023.

How can Maxwell be re-appointed to a new term when her current term has not expired and McCallum’s term has not yet expired? And, how can all of this occur in a legislative session that ends this year for service in 2019? Good questions. I do not know the answers.

For comparison to these shenanigans, here is Governor-elect Walker’s letter to then Gov. Doyle. In this letter, Walker asks that political appointees be prevented from returning to their civil service positions. That is, Walker was asking Doyle to stop state employees from exercising their civil service rights under state law to serve in their civil service jobs outside of political influence. Wow.

Note: there was no request from Walker to NOT make any political appointments, because there were none at issue back then. How times have changed. As Bruce Murphy indicates, Doyle essentially did what Walker wanted other than try to get year-late 2009-2011 collective bargaining agreements enacted.

So, Governor-elect Evers will get one appointment to the Commission in 2019. That appointment will require Senate approval, and that person will need to leave that position immediately should the Senate reject him or her under lame-duck SB884 (LRB 6071/1 and 6076/1), if that specific provision is not vetoed by Gov. Walker.

And so, the cautionary notes from Bruce Thompson deserve repeating:

For Vos and Fitzgerald [democracy] is not a consideration: their answer is to establish two sets of laws, one for Republican administrations, a different set for Democrats. They neither understand nor support the concept embodied in John Adams’ comment “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

They also undermine democracy by assuring that the democratically elected government is a weak government, a government unable to fulfill its promises to the electorate. They are doing their utmost to turn the Evers administration into a Republican administration when it comes to policy, in effect trying to annul the election. They want to force Evers’ first term to duplicate Walker’s intended third term.