As people in Wisconsin probably already know, there's a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year about transportation funding: it's designed, so it says, to prevent "raiding" the transportation fund to cover general budgetary needs of the state government, and it will prevent using transportation funds for anything other than transportation (if you follow the link, you will see how that benefits some of Scott Walker's best friends). How did I, a Maryland resident, find out about it? Well, I was trying to decide how to vote on a similar amendment on Maryland's ballot.
After many years of fighting the right wing, my gut-level response to constitutional amendments of any kind--except for those that extend human rights protections--is suspicion. It's not so much that I object to amending our state constitutions, or even the Constitution itself; it's that, in recent years, such amendments have usually been the products of right-wingers trying to cause trouble, most often by hiding the true impact of their amendments either behind obscure legal language, or behind some fallacious moral outrage i.e., "How dare they `raid' the transportation fund!" (I wish they cared as much about Wall St raiding our pensions and our city and state investment portfolios, or about cops raiding our actual houses and farms, often with horrific effects, but that's another story).
So when I see a Constitutional amendment on the ballot and I don't entirely understand its impacts, I look online to see if I can discern ALEC's friendly face smiling at me over the horizon.
The Center for Media and Democracy in Madison states that this bill not only restricts the use of revenue unnecessarily, but also favors certain kinds of transportation policy over others (guess which kinds!). If you guessed fossil-fuel based transport, you win a signed copy of Scott Walker's autobiography, Everything For Sale.
So, ALEC has been pushing this since 2008, and apparently haven't yet gotten what they wanted out of WI and MD, and here they are again trying to amend constitutions under the guise of being responsible stewards of the public money.
Wisconsin and Maryland voters take heed! Tell your neighbors. Forward these links around. I could have been fooled by this amendment when I first read it, were I not such an automatically suspicious grump.
