Hovde endorses Vukmir
2012 Senate Candidate Eric Hovde endorsed Sen. Vukmir today. Hovde was long rumored to be eyeing a run in 2016 against Tammy Baldwin, but opted not to run.
Vukmir’s Legislative Record
Voted to give Clinton Donor Millions from Wisconsin Taxpayers
In 2015, Leah Vukmir voted to take hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and give it to wealthy Democrats who backed Hillary Clinton for president. Marc Lasry is a billionaire who is a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. When Marc and his fellow owners wanted a new stadium for their team, they demanded that state taxpayers be forced to pay for it.
While Leah Vukmir was busy voting to give Marc Lasry and his fellow millionaires your state taxpayer dollars, Lasry was busy raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton. Lasry is a key part of the Clinton dynasty. In 2006 he hired Chelsea Clinton to work for his New York investment firm. In 2011 he gave Chelsea’s husband $1 million to start an investment fund. Last year, Hillary and Bill Clinton hung out with Marc at his daughter’s wedding.
The MacIver Institute called the logic behind the taxpayer giveaway of up to $400 million to the Bucks’ arena one of the “top 10 lies of 2015.” The conservative think-tank outlined the deal’s problems and flatly wrote to Wisconsin citizens: “you got robbed on this deal.”
Voted to Gut Wisconsin Open Records Law
Leah Vukmir voted in 2015 to gut the Wisconsin open records law while she served on the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee. The law allows anyone to hold government officials accountable by demanding to see official correspondence and legislative and executive branch documents. In a middle-of-the-night vote Vukmir voted for a proposal to extend a heavy blanket of secrecy over state government and prevent citizens from having open and honest access to government records and documents. Additionally, the measure sought to impose a gag order on anyone who worked in the state legislature if their boss didn’t want them to be a whistleblower.
“Transparency in government is not a liberal or conservative issue, it is a good government issue,” said the conservative MacIver Institute in expressing its opposition to the proposal. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which champions Constitutional rights and limited government, also opposed the changes.
Every Republican who voted for the bad proposal apologized for it later, except Leah Vukmir. She has never apologized for supporting a gag order on the free speech rights of government employees and citizen access to government.
Voted in Favor of Public Finance Authority, which has helped Planned Parenthood
In 2010, Leah Vukmir voted to create the Public Finance Authority, a crony capitalist agency that allows Wisconsin local governments to use their ability to issue tax-free bonds to compete against private sector bond financing. The year after Vukmir voted to create it, the PFA issued $30 million in tax-exempt bonds to fund the construction of Planned Parenthood’s national headquarters in New York. Not once has Leah criticized this use of government power to help Planned Parenthood’s finances. Not once has Leah attempted to end the crony capitalism of the PFA. The PFA has been so poorly run that the IRS and the federal Securities and Exchange Commission have investigated its dealings.
