Senior Producer Steve Walters discusses the possible outcomes of the Senate vote to oust Brian Bell, Wisconsin Ethics Commission Interim Administrator, and David Halbrooks, Wisconsin Ethics Commission Chair. WisconsinEye
MADISON - Hoping to oust the leaders of the state's ethics and elections commissions, Republicans in the state Senate will vote Tuesday on denying their confirmations.
It's the latest skirmish in the years-long war over how a sweeping John Doe investigation of Wisconsin Republicans was conducted. The probe was shut down in 2015 after the state Supreme Court ruled nothing illegal occurred in how Republicans ran their campaigns in recall elections.
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GOP senators contend denying confirmation votes Tuesday will remove from office ethics director Brian Bell and elections director Michael Haas. But the chairman of the state Elections Commission has said such a vote would have no effect and a lawsuit would have to be brought to oust Haas.
The Elections Commission — not the Senate — is the one that has the power to remove Haas, said Mark Thomsen, the chairman of that commission.
"They can't fire him," he said of the senators.
"Absent a majority vote by the commission, he will remain as the director," Thomsen, a Democrat, said of Haas. "The integrity of the elections in 2018 rely on that."
He noted Haas was recently granted security clearance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so he could be briefed on concerns about possible Russian attempts to hack Wisconsin's voting systems. Without Haas, the state would risk not getting important information quickly, he said.
Bell is also fighting for his job, but he believes the Senate vote would be decisive. He told reporters last week that he believed a denial of his confirmation would remove him from his job.
The probe of Republicans was conducted by prosecutors and the state Government Accountability Board, which at the time oversaw state campaign finance laws.
After the state's high court terminated the probe, GOP Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers dissolved the accountability board and replaced it with the Ethics Commission and Elections Commission, which each consist of three Republicans and three Democrats.
The commissions hired Bell and Haas, who both previously worked for the accountability board.
Bell and Haas came under renewed scrutiny last month when GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel issued a report on his attempts to find out who leaked secret material from the probe in 2016 to the Guardian U.S. newspaper.
Schimel wasn’t able to figure out who leaked the material but found it came from the accountability board. That prompted Republicans who control the Senate 18-13 to schedule the votes to deny Haas and Bell's confirmations.
At the accountability board, Bell did not work on the probe of Republicans. Haas was not part of the core investigation team but reviewed legal filings when the investigation was challenged in court.
While GOP lawmakers have called for Bell and Haas to go, the commissions have unanimously backed the pair. Walker repeatedly declined to say last week whether the two should go.
Bell and Haas have been fighting for their jobs by making appeals to senators and doing media interviews.
They contend they have acted in a professional and non-partisan way and deserve to keep their jobs. Haas said Sunday on WISN-TV's "UpFront with Mike Gousha" that he was being made a scapegoat because of GOP anger over the accountability board.
Bell has said he left the accountability board in part because of concerns about a liberal bias. In a Monday memo to Sen. Tom Tiffany (R-Hazelhurst), Bell contended the accountability board had not securely maintained records and said Haas had dismissed his concerns about how they were maintained.
Also Tuesday, the Senate is set to take up bills addressing replacing lead pipes and school report cards.
Lead pipes. Senate Bill 48 would help homeowners and water utilities replace lead pipes, an issue that has taken on renewed urgency after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that city officials had not acted on a memo sent nearly three years ago that detailed the risk to thousands of children posed by lead pipes.
The bill would allow utilities to use money from ratepayers to give grants and loans to homeowners to help pay for replacing more than 170,000 lead service lines to their houses.
The Senate unanimously passed it in October, but is taking it up again because the Assembly attached an amendment to it in November that would limit the maximum size of a grant to half the cost of replacing a line and would require water utilities to offer the same discounts to all of its customers.
If approved by the Senate on Tuesday, the bill would next go to Walker.
School report cards. The state Department of Public Instruction would have until Nov. 30 each year to publish its reports on how each of the state's schools are performing under Senate Bill 494. Now, the reports are due in September.
The bill would next go to the Assembly.