Earlier this week, Scott Walker signed into law the Foxconn jobs con job bill, which he is pinning his entire reelection bid on. As the gentle reader would recall, the Foxconn jobs con job including busting the state budget by giving away $3 billion to Foxconn for a plant to be built, if it does indeed ever get built, at some undisclosed location in Southeast Wisconsin
In exchange for this money - the largest corporate giveaway in American history - Foxconn would create an ever dwindling number of jobs. At first, Walker and company told us that it would be 53,000 jobs. This quickly dropped to 13,000, then 10,000, then 3,000. Now, Foxconn is telling us that it might be - just might be - 2,000 jobs.
Apparently, as a show of good faith, they already created their first job in Wisconsin - when they hired Keith Gilkes, Walker's campaign manager and head of his presidential PAC - to be their PR person. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot there!
But before Walker signed the bill, Walker made sure the Republican-controlled legislature tweaked it to make it even more of a con job. The Republicans voted to add that any legal appeals involving Foxconn would bypass the legislative system and go straight to the corporate-controlled Supreme Kangaroo Court, which has a reputation for making decisions based on campaign donations rather than the law.
Unsurprisingly, the lawyers for the legislature is now warning that this provision might be unconstituional - ya think?
The memo from the Wisconsin Legislative Council didn't come to definite conclusions but found several provisions of the legislation for Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan and its plant may be unconstitutional.
The provisions could give opponents of the Foxconn deal more lines of attack in litigation — and potentially drive up the cost to taxpayers for defending the state in court.
The law signed by Walker on Monday changes how environmental challenges and other potential legal cases over the factory would be handled, including automatically suspending any lower court orders until a higher court has weighed in.
The eight-page analysis highlights this provision among the areas of concern, saying the decision on whether to suspend rulings could be seen as a core power of the court system.
"A court could hold that the provision is unconstitutional if it finds that this provision violates the judiciary's independence in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities," the memo reads.
It's a typical Walker political stunt all the way around. Instead of using that money to fill the $1 billion gap in his state budget, repair the state's shitty roads (fourth worst in the nation), clean up the wall to wall roadkill or restore funding to the state's ravished public schools, Walker uses the money on an unconstitutional reelection ploy.
