MADISON, Wis. — Republican State Senator Steve Nass, one of the longest tenured GOP representatives in the Wisconsin State Legislature, took petty partisan politics to a new low today by calling on his colleagues in the legislature to skip out on their jobs and not pass a state budget this year.
“Republicans in the state legislature standing silently aside as Donald Trump crashes our economy and launches a hostile takeover of our government is bad enough,” said Mike Browne, deputy director of A Better Wisconsin Together. “But demanding the legislature intentionally not do its job and in the process inflict needless harms on working families, children and seniors is an alarming new low, even for Wisconsin Republicans.”
Nass’s call for a Republican budget boycott comes less than 24 hours after Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee voted down plans to help Wisconsin’s working families with income and property tax savings, lower child care, health care, and prescription drug costs, clean water and more.
Rep. Mark Born, a Republican Co-Chair of the finance committee, characterized the essential resources they threw out as a, “pile full of stuff that didn’t make sense.”
“If Senator Nass and his GOP colleagues don’t want to do their jobs – for which they are paid, and also receive generous health care benefits, pension benefits, and even an extra daily payment just for showing up at the office – then they should find a different line of work, because they’re certainly not doing their duty of serving the public,” Browne said.