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Evers Pulls an About-Face on Several Campaign Promises Shortly Before Assuming Office
[Madison, WI] – Newly elected Governor Tony Evers is already off to a rocky start after reversing his position on several key issues just days before assuming office. Yesterday, the MacIver Institute reported on how Evers has already begun to change his tune on several hot-button policy positions, despite promises he made on the campaign trail. Voters should keep a close eye on how many campaign promises Governor Evers breaks as he begins to roll-out his agenda.
Read the full story here or find excerpts below.
An Inauspicious Start: Tony Evers Changes His Position on Key Issues Days Before Taking Office
MacIver Institute
Chris Rochester
January 7, 2019
Last week, Gov.-Elect Tony Evers reversed course on a handful of issues that were cornerstones of his campaign.
The incoming governor, set to take the oath of office today, already has a well-documented record of changing his story on whether he plans to increase taxes on Wisconsinites. But as he made the rounds in the media, Evers went on the record discussing a slate of hot button campaign issues – and, in several cases, directly contradicting his own previous statements.
Evers has changed his tune on key policy issues like school choice, Foxconn, abolishing the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC), the minimum wage, and Act 10.
When it comes to taxes, Evers has gone from “everything’s on the table” to an 11th-hour campaign promise to “raise no taxes” and, remarkably, back again.
Evers quickly changed his mind about whether he’d follow, or ignore, a slate of laws passed in the Legislature’s extraordinary session last month.
While Evers’ change of tune on the extraordinary session laws was his fastest, maybe his most significant is his new position on abolishing school choice…On the campaign trail, Evers made his stance clear: he wants to abolish the program…But he reversed course in an interview with WisconsinEye. Ending the state’s school choice program “can’t happen,” he said…Faced with a Republican Legislature unlikely to go along with any effort to abolish school choice, Evers now offers vague promises of “transparency.”
“I’m not going to be proposing anything in the budget about WEDC,” Evers said in Wednesday’s WisconsinEye interview. That stands in stark contrast to his campaign pledge to abolish the quasi-public economic development agency championed by Walker as a replacement for the state’s old Commerce Department.
He’s also backing off his criticism of WEDC’s top achievement over the past eight years, Foxconn…During the campaign, Evers said he would hold Foxconn’s feet to the fire, saying just enough to placate the far left that hates the deal and the tens of thousands of private sector jobs it promises to bring. But Evers recently backed off much of that rhetoric
During the campaign, Evers’ vision for a minimum wage increase was pretty clear: “We’re going to $15 an hour minimum. Minimum,” he said at a rally at UW-Milwaukee to roaring applause from the crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters. But in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Evers seemingly backed off the $15-at-a-minimum promise, declining to give a specific figure. While his first budget will offer a “clear pathway” to raising the wage, “Evers declined to say how, or how much, his budget would propose to increase the state’s minimum wage,” the paper reported.
During the primary, Evers backed repealing Act 10, Walker’s signature collective bargaining reform law that’s saved taxpayers more than $5 billion…If Republicans were to maintain control of the Legislature, Evers said at the time, he’d still work toward a compromise giving government employees more bargaining power and tipping the scales of government away from taxpayers and back in favor of state workers. Now that he’s the incoming governor with a Republican-controlled Legislature, Evers is telling the media he hasn’t made decisions about Act 10 yet.
Read the full story here.
