A group of first-term Democratic legislators is pushing for something guaranteed to not happen in this session of the Legislature — redistricting reform, reports WSAU.com:

Representative Mandy Wright from Wausau says the current law allowing the majority party in the Assembly and state Senate to redraw the political boundaries every ten years is flawed. “We would like to stop the finger pointing and stop the color game, and make sure that redistricting is handed over to a non-partisan agency that can objectively draw the district lines.”

Wright says the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau would be a good candidate to put the board together.

Iowa established more than three decades ago a non-partisan body to redraw the political lines. Wright says the Iowa model will help to reduce political bickering and save money. “To date, we have spent two million taxpayer dollars on redistricting, on the redistricting session that most recently happened. The bill that we’re proposing in Iowa cost the state approximately one thousand dollars.”

Wright says the likely outcome would be a voting district which more closely reflects the population. She says it’s likely to lead to less bickering between the parties.

Reform, however the proponents define it, is one of the oldest political themes. This country is the result of radical reform of how British colonies were governed. The Republican Party owes its existence to the desire to reform race relations by eliminating slavery. Wisconsin politics today was shaped, for better or worse, by the Progressive movement more than 100 years ago.

Today, and probably well before today, reform has been proposed first by those on the political outside. And in the dictatorship of the majority that is the state Assembly, no one is more outside than first-term representatives from the minority party. That’s not a judgment of the merits of their proposal; that is political reality. Given that the first and most important goal of a politician is to stay in office, when Democrats eventually regain control of the Assembly, this proposal to reform redistricting has at least a 50–50 chance to slip their minds.

To be potentially unfair to Wright and the other first-term Democrats, who theoretically had nothing to do with this, while their party controlled the Legislature, one year before the 2010 Census, redistricting reform was nowhere to be found on Democrats’ agenda, and for an obvious reason — Democrats wanted the ability to draw the maps themselves after the 2010 Census and 2010 election.

I support redistricting reform because of which party the redistricting process benefits — not the Republican Party or Democratic Party, whichever is in power in a Legislature in a year ending with the number one, but the incumbent party, which is always in power. Given the reelection rate of incumbents in an era when trust is in our elected officials is at an all-time low, the process obviously favors the incumbents.

In fact, I support many political reforms, although the reforms I support aren’t necessarily the same that Wright and her fellow freshman Democrats support. Dave Zweifel, editor emeritus of The Capital Times, may have supported returning to a part-time Legislature when Democrats controlled the Legislature, but I highly doubt it. Nevertheless, Zweifel is right, but in addition the state should be employing half or fewer the number of staffers of legislators the state currently employs.

Gov. Scott Walker claims, as did his predecessors, that the state budget is balanced. State law requires the budget be balanced, but only on a cash basis, not upon Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which (1) is more appropriate for an enterprise that spends $35 billion a year, and (2) is what the state requires of every other municipality.

Wisconsin has the fifth highest state and local taxes in the nation, and has been in the top 10 every year for the past three decades. One reason is that the state constitution includes no limits on taxing or spending for state government or any other unit of government other than the uniformity clause. Having limits on spending and/or taxes would force fiscal responsibility on Democrats and Republicans of any amount of legislative experience.

Redistricting reform, GAAP budget balancing, and restrictions on spending and taxation need to be part of the state Constitution. All of those initiatives can be classified as protections of citizens from government, whether that’s government taking too much of their money, or legislators creating for themselves or their parties lifetime roles as state legislators.

The U.S. Constitution, you see, is a document full of what the federal government cannot do to its citizens. The Wisconsin Constitution contains similar restrictions on government (in the case of gun ownership rights, the Wisconsin Constitution is superior to the U.S. Constitution). You’d never know that, though, from looking at not merely levels of taxation in this state, but from looking at what  government does that government should not be doing.

I’d suggest the first-term Democrats in the Legislature — for that matter, every legislator, present and future — commit to memory article 1, section 22 of the state Constitution: “The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”