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GUEST COLUMN

Tax bill's paternity trail leads out of state

By Donald Kettl

Bubbling up out of the state Assembly is a "taxpayer's bill of rights" aimed at holding the line on tax increases. It's been presented as a grassroots effort. However, "TABOR," as it's known, is really part of a tightly coordinated crusade of national conservatives to "starve the beast" they see as government spending.

Its principal Wisconsin sponsors, Rep. Frank Lasse, R-Bellevue, and Rep, Jeff Wood, R-Chippewa Falls, are pushing a constitutional amendment to limit the growth of spending to inflation' plus population growth for the state government and school districts. For local governments, the limit would be set by inflation plus new construction.

Just behind the scenes of the Wisconsin effort, however, is a multi-state  campaign coordinated by Citizens for a Sound Economy. Heading this Washington-based lobbying group is Dick Armey, an 18-year  veteran of the U.S. House of Representatives. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, he served as majority leader and worked closely with Newt Gingrich to champion the "Contract with America."

After he left Congress, he moved on to CSE, where he's continued his fight to cut government spending.

Early this year, his organization proudly proclaimed that "from sea to shining sea, CSE is leading a grassroots uprising against higher taxes." Armey and his colleagues have made no mistake about their sharp-elbowed partisanship. Their materials contrast "the Democratic sewer of bad ideas past'' with George W. Bush's tax cuts.

Armey's own support for TABOR comes from a driving belief that: "Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision." He's targeted Wisconsin, along with Florida, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington, for TABOR battles in 2004, and CSE put its staff and publicity machine to work. I CSE regularly features the Lasee-Wood  campaign on its Web site.

Some Assembly Republicans have found TABOR irresistible. It gives them a chance to pick up the flag of the Reagan revolution and plant it squarely in Wisconsin's constitution. If they pass the TABOR resolution this spring and again in the next session, they can put it on the 2006 ballot without the need for Gov. Doyle's approval.

They hope that would force the Doyle re-election campaign either to cave in to the Republican agenda or be painted as a fan of higher taxes. Now that Republicans have captured the Senate and Assembly, they think that TABOR could help them gain control of the governor's house as well. Lasee is blunt. He sees TABOR as a way "to make the Democrats more useless in the future because they can't give away other people's money as easily."

Wisconsin, of course, is no stranger to the inside-outside battle. It's raged for years over issues as far-ranging as welfare reform and school choice, from the right, and abortion rights and environmental policy, from the left.

But the conservative push from Washington on TABOR raises a tough dilemma for Wisconsin Republicans. The party's national strategists look at Al Gore's razor-thin, 5,000vote margin in the 2000 election, and they think this is a state Bush can win. That explains the saturation coverage of television commercials from both sides.

The TABOR battle, however, risks pulling the party to the right just as Bush is trying to push it to the center to win crucial swing states like Wisconsin. That could put TABOR-ites sharply at odds with top officials from their own party.

In addition, the Republican U.S. Senate race is now a jumble of undifferentiated candidates. They believe that their best chance of winning is to portray Sen. Russ Feingold as too far to the left too out of step with Wisconsin voters. If TABOR lures them to the right, they'll lose whatever traction that issue might give them.

This dilemma forces Wisconsin Republicans into a tough choice: playing the state policy game by trying to paint Doyle into a corner; or working for the party's national interest by nudging toward the middle. Many observers of state politics have all but assumed some form of TABOR will pass, but the political dynamics make that far from a sure thing.

Kettl, a UW-Madison political scientist, writes regularly on state politics for the Wisconsin State Journal.
Reprinted with permission.