Campaign fliers at Capitol a problem
2:06 PM 6/23/01
Phil Brinkman State government reporter
Attorney general candidate Peg Lautenschlager canceled a fund-raiser planned for Friday after learning volunteers for her campaign distributed invitations in Capitol offices, in apparent violation of state campaign finance law.
"Candidates for attorney general need to set a standard for what's appropriate and what's not appropriate," said Lautenschlager, who was U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin from 1993 until April of this year.
The fund-raiser, a "staff lunch" to be held at a friend's apartment near the Capitol, carried a suggested donation of $25. Lautenschlager said a couple of "well-intentioned volunteers" distributed fliers for the event to legislative staff in the Capitol earlier this month.
Wisconsin law prohibits soliciting campaign contributions from state employees at their state offices. The law goes as far as requiring state employees to block access to their offices to anyone seeking to make or receive a contribution.
Lautenschlager, a Democrat, said she was chagrined by the lapse. But by her own and others' accounts, she is far from the first to violate the provision.
During its investigation of campaign activity by employees at the four legislative caucuses, the Wisconsin State Journal uncovered evidence that legislative employees frequently distribute in the Capitol invitations to fish boils, brat fries and other campaign events.
Memos obtained by the State Journal show one group, Staff Working for an Assembly Republican Majority, or SWARM, even recruited volunteers to put up yard signs and distribute campaign literature door-to-door. The group operates at the direction of Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, R-Waukesha.
"I know it's quite a common practice (in the Capitol)," said Lautenschlager, who was in the state Assembly from 1989 to 1993. "When I was in the Legislature, we used to get campaign notices almost daily."
Five former legislative staffers interviewed by the State Journal said the pressure to campaign was often intense, with professional advancement tied to the degree to which employees volunteered to help.
Because legislative staffers aren't covered by the same job protections enjoyed by other state workers, lawmakers may base personnel decisions on an employee's willingness to campaign on his or her free time. (The same law against political solicitation, however, prohibits legislators from demanding such work at the office.)
Assembly Chief Clerk John Scocos said he is working on some new policies that would make the legislative workplace more fair and more "like any other (state) agency."
"In the Capitol, there's definitely an expectation that personal (legislative) staff would work not only on their own boss's campaign, but that they would be expected to work on campaigns outside their own offices," said Mike Boerger, a former staffer of the Senate Republican Caucus who also worked throughout the 1990s as a legislative aide.
Gary Bahr, a Democrat from Belleville who ran for the Assembly in 1994, said both legislative aides and employees of the taxpayer-funded Assembly Democratic Caucus worked on his campaign on state time and with state resources.
"Sadly, we do have public financing of campaigns in Wisconsin through our partisan caucuses and ... our state Legislature aides," Bahr said. "It is evidenced by how their offices empty during the campaigns and by the testimony of candidates like myself. It is wrong, and we should all work to end it."
Lautenschlager said she first learned volunteers for her campaign were soliciting in the Capitol after an anonymous letter-writer complained. Until the complaint, Lautenschlager said she hadn't known such activity was prohibited.
As a non-legislator, Lautenschlager said, she found it ironic that someone complained about her when "there are incumbent legislators over there who have some political power to wield who do this sort of thing regularly." She declined to elaborate.
She pledged her campaign wouldn't make the same mistake again.
"Hopefully, we'll set a standard that says to people in the Capitol, This is a practice that really shouldn't go on,' " she said.
Her opponent for the Democratic nomination, state Sen. Brian Burke, D-Milwaukee, said separating state business from campaign activity has "always been our policy."
"Any state employee doing political work, it's done on their own time and outside the Capitol," Burke said of his own campaign.

State Journal reporter Dee J. Hall contributed to this story.