Good morning.
![](https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-View-From.jpeg)
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 23. Sunrise is 7:17 and sunset is 4:56, for 9 hours, 39 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renames it the “Frisbee.”
I’m not a member of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. I’m also not looking for El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, or the Lost City of Z. It’s possible that Wisconsin Democrats are looking for some of these fantastical places, because they’re still looking for bipartisanship with the WISGOP.
The Democrats have been searching for months. See The Glistening Optimism of Wisconsin’s Senate Democrats and That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There.
The fruits of this quest have been wanting, as Baylor Spears reports:
Each session the Assembly Speaker has the responsibility for determining the number of members per committee, unless a rule specifies otherwise. The Speaker also determines the ratio of majority to minority members on each committee. The committees are essential to the lawmaking process given that they are where bills are first moved to be discussed after being introduced, where bills receive public input and are debated by lawmaker before ever being considered for a vote by the full body.
Democrats have complained about losing members on committees despite winning additional seats in the full body. Despite Republican’s narrower majority this session, in some cases Democrats make up a smaller proportion of members on committees than they did in the last session.
“Unfortunately, Assembly Republican Leadership has chosen to begin the legislative session in a highly partisan fashion, reducing Democratic positions on the vast majority of committees despite the people of Wisconsin choosing to replace ten incumbent Republican legislators with Democrats in the last election,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said in a statement announcing Democratic committee membership. “I hope my Republican colleagues will choose to shift course and join Democrats in putting the people of Wisconsin over partisan politics in the coming legislative session.”
Neubauer’s staff said they were not consulted by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) about the committee sizes or ratios.
Rep. Robyn Vining (D-Wauwatosa) said there was a “general understanding” that with more members in the house overall, Democrats were expecting that to be reflected in committees. Democrats picked up 10 additional seats in the Assembly, making the body about 55% Republican and 45% Democratic.
See Baylor Spears, Assembly committees this session are different — and smaller, Wisconsin Examiner, January 22, 2025.
I’m sure Rep. Vining is an intelligent and capable representative, but here her charity exceeds her opponents’ merit. There can be no general understanding with these WISGOP leaders. They’ll say what they want and later take what they want.
Indeed, I’m not sure why the Wisconsin Democrats aren’t aware of the video record of Speaker Robin Vos’s past scheming. It’s right there, on YouTube:
(There’s much to learn from Tolkien, in print, of course, but from Peter Jackson’s films, too.)
Here’s a palate cleanser after that last video. Disc Dog – amazing disc catching dogs: