The Milwaukee Post

July 26, 2013 • Milwaukee Post • 9 OPINION Van Hollen invisible as AG A prominent conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, recently ran a major piece on the newest group of activists in the Republican Party: state attorneys general. They profiled about 20 of them. Wisconsin's J.B. Van Hollen's name was never mentioned. Van Hollen is an empty suit. He has a potentially powerful job but strives to make the least of it. This seems to be by design. Van Hollen figures if he doesn't do anything he can't make anybody mad. Indeed, with all the venom liberals throw around at Scott Walker and state Republicans, Van Hollen never gets a mention. I think the lefties kind of like him. Why shouldn't they? What has he ever done to them? What, in fact, has he ever done? Whenever an issue comes up with legal implications, Van Hollen's response is to say it isn't his job to do anything about it. When the board that runs state elections deliberately ignored laws requiring it to verify voter rolls, Van Hollen did nothing. It was the same nothing when we learned top University of Wisconsin System officials were concealing a massive slush fund. He doesn't do anything about vote fraud in Milwaukee. And, on the signature legal issue of our time, President Obama's health care law, Van Hollen did little more than sign his name to a lawsuit filed by other states. J.B.'s defenders tell me it could be worse. We could have a Democrat in there. True, Van Hollen isn't drunkenly crashing his state car but if doing better than Peg Lautenschlager is the bar we are setting, he isn't being graded on a very demanding curve. In truth, most Republicans are so proud of Walker and the state Legislature they have given Van Hollen a pass for his blank slate of a track record. Still, when you consider that Wisconsin is the home of a revolution of fiscal reform and is producing a new generation of leaders, Van Hollen's mediocrity sticks out like a sore thumb. State Republicans have produced Walker, Paul Ryan, Ron Johnson, Sean Duffy Reid Ribble and national party , chair Reince Priebus. All have, or are, developing major national reputations. Van Hollen? Nobody outside of Wisconsin has heard of him. Actually not that many peo, ple inside of Wisconsin know who he is. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes says the large group of Republican AGs who are creatively using the law to advance fiscally conservative positions and help their states deal with the quagmire of Obamacare is broken into two groups. One group is the overt activists. The others are the legal strategists. Van Hollen isn't in either of those groups. He's in the "Don't bother me, I'm sleeping" camp. Van Hollen's slumbering tenure isn't surprising. He comes from the "Madison" wing of the Republican Party the branch that , gets the heebie-jeebies when it bumps into an actual conservative (see Schultz, Dale or Prange, Phil for reference). When he ran in a contested Republican primary seven years ago, he was backed by most of the old Republican goats who did just fine getting along with then-Gov. Jim Doyle. Van Hollen has pretty much turned out like you expected. Maybe a tad lazier, but still within the range of his ilk. He'll probably be re-elected next year with ease. I'm sure that's the goal. But if you're not going to do anything with a major governmental job, what's the point in having it? *** Van Hollen's biggest responsibility has been to defend all of the state laws passed by Walker and the Legislature that are routinely challenged in state and federal courts in Madison. Here he seems to be doing a competent job. It takes years, but so far every major Walker law has been ultimately upheld. But Van Hollen has chosen not to use his platform to criticize the filing of these trivial cases. The attorney general could aggressively speak out on the Democrats' abuse of the legal system by filing lawsuits aimed at blocking every single initiative from the Republicans. He not only doesn't do it publicly he hasn't lobbied newspaper editorial, ists or even worked on a strategy to stop the lawsuits. If asked, I'm sure he will say that isn't his job. Nothing evidently is, other than STANDING UP for MILWAUKEE MARK BELLING the bare minimum laid out in the statutes. *** The state Supreme Court says Milwaukee's sewerage district (the one that gobbles up taxes from the suburbs) is responsible for the damage the Deep Tunnel is doing to downtown buildings. They're sinking because groundwater is seeping into the tunnel, causing building pilings to rot. The court says the district has to fix it. This may cost hundreds of millions and result in as many as 60 dumpings of raw sewage a year. The tunnel was built to stop an environmental atrocity but has only limited it, while causing a new and separate nightmare. Simply separating downtown Milwaukee sewers would have solved the problem but it wasn't done then and still isn't being done. Suburbanites were fleeced out of their money to build the tunnel yet not a single one of their "leaders" is offering a peep of protest now. (Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show. His column appears weekly in the Milwaukee Post. Send your personal correspondences to Mark Belling at Clear Channel Communications, c/o WISN, 12100 W. Howard Ave., Greenfield, WI 53228). A nation of laws no longer applies By OWEN ROBINSON America has always prided itself on being a nation of laws and not of men. In fact, it was one of the founding principles of our nation. Yet we are witnessing a trend of liberals shunning that heritage by engaging in outright lawlessness to advance their agendas. Perhaps the nation's liberals are taking their cue from our No. 1 liberal: President Barack Obama. As Obamacare comes barreling into existence wreaking economic havoc, Obama unilaterally decided to delay implementation of the employer mandate portion of the law for a year. The employer mandate requires businesses with 50 or more employees to provide "affordable" health insurance to their employees or face government fines. It was supposed to go into effect next year, but Obama has delayed it to 2015. While Obama has not given a reason for the delay, there are two obvious reasons. First, the employer mandate is a terrible drag on the economy. Large employers have been moving many employees to part-time status to avoid the mandate and medium businesses have been shunning hiring if doing so would push them over the 50-employee mark. By delaying it by one year, Obama hopes to push the disastrous economic effects of the mandate until after the 2014 congressional elections. Robinson Second, by delaying the employer mandate but retaining the individual mandate that a person must purchase health insurance if their employer does not offer it, Obama is pushing millions of people into his fictional health care exchanges (none of them are actually operating yet) and into the arms of government. But one can't escape the fact that Obama is acting completely outside of the law. The Obamacare law passed by Congress is explicit about the implementation dates of various portions of it and the executive does not have the authority to change those dates without the approval of Congress. While the irony of Obama delaying his train wreck is amusing to us conservatives, we can't ignore that it is utterly illegal. Here in southeast Wisconsin, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee Common Council have adopted Obama's modus operandi by defying the law in their own right. The state Legislature passed a law that forbids local governments from having residency rules in most instances. Barrett apparently believes that allowing city employees to live where they want will destroy Milwaukee, so the council and he instructed city department leaders to continue to enforce the residency rule even though state law forbids it. Like with Obama, Barrett and the council's action is completely contrary to the law. Instead of going to court for a legal stay of the law, which has become commonplace for liberals in Wisconsin, Barrett has chosen to just disregard state law altogether simply because he doesn't like it. Not only does that irresponsibly expose the city of Milwaukee to potentially expensive lawsuits, it exposes Barrett and the city council as recalcitrant reprobates. But it is not just our politicians who see fit to break the law to advance their own political agendas. Shocking video of the Wisconsin protesters released by Media Matters showed radical eco-nuts protesting at the newly approved iron mining site in northern Wisconsin. The protesters verbally assaulted and threatened workers, stole and destroyed property, engaged in and threatened violence, and even tried to impede the response from law enforcement. As with Obama and Barrett, they chose to break the law to force their minority political agenda on everyone around them when they did not get their way. We live in ominous times when liberals from the White House to the woods of northern Wisconsin willfully and vigorously break the laws they do not like in order to advance their political aspirations. Americans shed a nation of men once. Let us pray that we are not compelled to do so again. (Owen B. Robinson is a West Bend resident. His column appears occasionally in The Post.)

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