This past weekend — Independence Day weekend, ironically — I got a lesson that however cynical I am about politics and politicians, including those I vote for, I’m not cynical enough.

Tucked into the current version of the 2015–17 state budget passed by the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee was a provision that would have gutted the state’s Open Records Law for the benefit of legislators.

The Wisconsin Newspaper Association describes the provision thusly:

“The Legislature is attempting to change for its purposes the very definition of “public record,’” said Wisconsin Newspaper Association Executive Director Beth Bennett. “The ‘legal privilege’ these lawmakers seek is tantamount to a blank check to close the government to scrutiny from citizens and the press.” Read the full WNA press release here.

Attorney General Brad Schimel calls the move “a step in the wrong direction.”

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council calls the move “an assault on Wisconsin’s long and proud tradition of open government.“

That news broke late last week. The Wisconsin State Journal reported this Independence Day night:

In the face of withering criticism, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican leaders of the Legislature announced Saturday that a provision added to the state budget to gut the open records law “will be removed from the budget in its entirety.”

Walker made the announcement Saturday afternoon in a joint statement with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R–Juneau, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R–Rochester, and Joint Finance Committee co-Chairs, Sen. Alberta Darling, R–River Hills, and Rep. John Nygren, R–Marinette.

“We are steadfastly committed to open and accountable government,” the statement said. “The intended policy goal of these changes was to provide a reasonable solution to protect constituents’ privacy and to encourage a deliberative process between elected officials and their staff in developing policy. It was never intended to inhibit transparent government in any way.”

The statement said the Legislature will form a Legislative Council committee to study the matter outside of the budget process.

No one claimed responsibility for requesting the language be added to a sweeping omnibus amendment the Legislature’s budget committee passed late Thursday. And it’s unclear what role, if any, Walker played in the drama over the past few days.

But amid near-universal condemnation of the move and bipartisan demands that the language be withdrawn or that Walker use his partial veto power to strip it out of the budget if it passed, the governor and the leadership conceded defeat on the issue.

Republican leaders have refused to say who initially sought the changes or why.

Among other things, the revisions would have rendered secret virtually all records and communications by lawmakers and policymakers at the state and local levels.

Drafting files for legislation would have no longer been public, and legislators would have been granted a “legal privilege” or right to refuse to disclose any communication that occurred during the lawmaker’s term in office.

The measure, which Darling and Nygren allowed to be added to the omnibus motion, stunned advocates of open government and prompted many lawmakers, including some Republicans, to pledge not to vote for a budget that contained the items.

It is, first, unbelievable that Walker, who supposedly is running or president, allowed this to get as far as it did. Reporters who cover the White House have called it the most secretive and least media-helpful White House of all time. Hillary Clinton will never win anyone’s Freedom of Information award (one word: “Benghazi”). And yet the state GOP apparently was fine with being on the state level what the White House is on the federal level in terms of working away from public view and scrutiny.

There are at least three ironies about this. I believe this was prompted by the experience of state Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D–Middleton), who was communicating via state email with state employees about the Act 10 public employee collective bargaining reforms. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sued Erpenbach to see the emails after he refused to release them, in violation of the state Open Records Law. Erpenbach lost. He deserved to lose.

It is also ironic that one apparent supporter of this hideous legislation, Fitzgerald, is the former owner of the Dodge County Independent News. One wonders what newspaper publisher Fitzgerald would have thought of politician Fitzgerald.

Then again, this flies in the face of what gubernatorial candidate Walker said to The Lakeland Times in Minocqua in 2010:

When he says he believes in government transparency, it’s not just a campaign slogan, Walker said.

“I don’t just say that, I’ve lived it,” he said. “(In Milwaukee County), we have put all government purchases online at no additional cost. Every purchase, everything we enter into our accounting software, automatically in real time goes on to a website that tells the public every purchase by department. Not only a journalist but a citizen journalist or anybody else can track it down.”

Walker said he does not favor proposed constraints on access to police 911 tapes or to the state’s online circuit court records, and he says he also believes the Legislature itself needs to be more transparent.

“In fact I’ve even proposed – in terms of the budget process, but it would apply to anything – other things that would help transparency,” he said. “I don’t think there should be any votes in closed caucus, on any issue. If a county board or school board can’t discuss a budget in private, then the state Legislature certainly should not. There should not be any closed caucuses on the budget.”

What’s more, he said, the budget should only entail budgetary items; there shouldn’t be any nonfiscal items in it.

“And I would make it, by statute, that the Legislature can’t vote on anything after 10 at night or before 9 in the morning,” Walker said. “They did things this last (budget) at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning. As I tell my staff, nothing good happens after midnight. But they did it on purpose because not only do they not want average persons to know, they don’t want reporters with deadlines to know – after 10 you miss the nightly TV news and you’re not in print for the daily newspapers. They push it back on a Saturday, hoping people won’t read about things like that.”

This appears to have been prompted by the unidentified author’s, or authors’, desire to keep away from public view the various pre-introduction versions of legislation, including legislation written in some form by such groups as the American Legislative Exchange Council. Democrats and their apparatchiks have been complaining about ALEC’s supposed influence in legislation, as if only ideas created in Wisconsin have any merit. (The groups complaining the loudest, including Zero Wisconsin Now, are groups who have spent the 2010s losing elections and legislative votes.)

Well, so what? Being in power means you have to withstand the scrutiny of the opposition, whether you like it or not, whether the opposition has any valid points or not, and whether the opposition is fair or not. That also applies to dealing with the news media. It demonstrates a lack of intellectual courage to not be able to argue legislation on its merits when someone complains about the source of said legislation, as if, for instance, fiscal responsibility is a concept that should be foreign to Wisconsin. (The apparent idea of changing the wording of the Wisconsin Idea could have, for instance, been justified as (1) the need to make the UW System adhere to the educational, economic and vocational realities of the 21st century, or (2) with easy-to-obtain examples of how UW System professors teach only from the left-side pages of the textbook, making the term “sifting and winnowing” less correct than one assumes its author had in mind.)

Democrats are having a field day with this, which is unsurprising, yet hypocritical. They can vote against it now and take full advantage of it should it become law. The beneficiary of this is not specifically Republicans; it’s incumbents, who would be able to do their work away from the eyes of, among others, potential future challengers. (Which is why I now believe the state Open Meetings and Open Records laws need to be in the state Constitution, to make it nearly impossible to eviscerate the concept of open government.)

I am sure some readers of this blog hate the news media and could not care less if the Legislature makes it more difficult for the media to do their jobs. There are those in the Republican Party who think the media has it in for them and therefore are perfectly willing to stick it to the likes of Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chris Rickert of the Wisconsin State Journal, every person getting a paycheck from The Capital Times, radio’s Sly, Wisconsin Public Radio, and so on. It could even be argued that the media has brought this on itself by being insufficiently critical toward Democrats, and being knee-jerk critical of Republicans, particularly on the opinion page, and well before Walker’s election in 2010.

Here is why those of you who see your views in the previous paragraph are mistaken. In the same way that the First Amendment applies to all Americans, not just the news media, the state Open Records and Open Meetings laws apply to all Wisconsinites, not just those who oppose what’s going on in a particular political body, and not just the news media. It is also rather arrogant to assume that the GOP will remain in control in Madison for perpetuity, or until you are past caring. Republicans would be screaming bloody murder if legislative Democrats had tried this the last time they controlled all of state government, in 2009 and 2010, and rightly so.

Remember Recallarama? The reason why Wisconsinites know who signed the recall forms, and now are able to question whether state and local government employees or news media who wanted Walker and other Republicans recalled are able to perform their jobs impartially is because of an Open Records Law request. The same Open Records Law allows Wisconsinites to find out how much every single employee of government is paid with their tax dollars. That is why such non-Democrats as Right Wisconsin and Jerry Bader and numerous conservative groups were appropriately swift to condemn the JFC vote and to urge Walker to veto it from the budget. That is also why there was no one I saw, in the Legislature, media or anywhere else, willing to defend this disaster.

Independent of whether policy items belong in the budget at all (they don’t, but both parties add them to state budgets with voter impunity), this proposal should not be in the budget, or anywhere else. Walker and Republican leaders had better be telling the truth that changes to the Open Records Law are dead. The people paying for government have an absolute right to know what government, including government employees and politicians, are doing with their tax dollars.