Green & Bucher Refuse to Answer Ethics Questions
The League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign sent out a questionnaire on ethics to all candidates for state office.
The "Yes or No" questions pertain to issues ranging from ethics reform to campaign finance reform to election reform to lobbying reform. You can read all of the questions here.
Jim Doyle, Kathleen Falk, Peg Lautenschlager, and Nelson Eisman (Green Party gubernatorial candidate) each responded "Yes" to all of the questions.
J.B. Van Hollen responded "Yes" to two of the questions (#1 and #6) and "No" to the other four.
Mark Green and Paul Bucher did not respond at all to the questionnaire. And why would they? They're only running for statewide office.
Full responses (or lack thereof) from the statewide candidates can be found here. Responses by candidates for other state offices (Assembly & Senate) can be found here.
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UPDATE: The JS PoliticsWatch blog is reporting that Green "did not have enough time to fill out the survey," so his campaign manager decided to do an interview with the JS instead.
No time for six "Yes or No" questions sent out three weeks ago, but plenty of time for an interview when contacted by a reporter this afternoon. It sounds like someone doesn't want to go on the record without his comfortable talking points to cloud the answers.
The "Yes or No" questions pertain to issues ranging from ethics reform to campaign finance reform to election reform to lobbying reform. You can read all of the questions here.
Jim Doyle, Kathleen Falk, Peg Lautenschlager, and Nelson Eisman (Green Party gubernatorial candidate) each responded "Yes" to all of the questions.
J.B. Van Hollen responded "Yes" to two of the questions (#1 and #6) and "No" to the other four.
Mark Green and Paul Bucher did not respond at all to the questionnaire. And why would they? They're only running for statewide office.
Full responses (or lack thereof) from the statewide candidates can be found here. Responses by candidates for other state offices (Assembly & Senate) can be found here.
---------------
UPDATE: The JS PoliticsWatch blog is reporting that Green "did not have enough time to fill out the survey," so his campaign manager decided to do an interview with the JS instead.
No time for six "Yes or No" questions sent out three weeks ago, but plenty of time for an interview when contacted by a reporter this afternoon. It sounds like someone doesn't want to go on the record without his comfortable talking points to cloud the answers.
posted by Seth Zlotocha at Tuesday, August 01, 2006
5 Comments:
Or maybe answering yes or no on complex issues is a horrible idea.
SB1, for example, is was a bill that worked in theory - but not in practice. Wisconsin law has a legal system which allows very few people the right to charge someone with a crime on behaqlf of the state. Those few people are surrounded with a system of checks and balances - and recourse.
SB1 creates a system whereby elected officials can be charged with a crime by the state without any of the safeguards in place. As Briam Blanchard has proven - partisan politics is alive and well in the established legal system. Creating a new one, whereby somebody has to justify their paycheck by charging people, is a recipe for disaster.
Green might be for combining the elections and ethics board and creating new parameters for elected officials without branding a new sherrif to stir up the political dust on a whim.
But how would get a point like that across in a yes or no format?
The quiz had a space for qualifying answers with comments. If you look at JB Van Hollen's reponses, he does just that for almost each one.
Besides, Green didn't cite the problems of a "Yes-No" survey as his reason for not responding -- he just made the ridiculous (and insulting) claim that he couldn't find the time to complete it in 3 weeks. He very well could have responded in letter form to the groups explaining why he didn't feel comfortable answering the questions in the format provided, but he didn't.
There's no excuse for ignoring this survey from three respected groups in the state (the Green Team has even cited the WDC on its ethics charges against Doyle, so I'm assuming they consider the group to be credible).
Respected? Not so much.
Do you think Mark Green would go on the record with that?
Give the guy a break! He's been too busy saving frozen future tax payers for the last 3 weeks!
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