With Friends Like These....

The Assembly voted late yesterday to block an effort to bring Senate Bill 1 to the floor for a vote.

The roll call vote on the motion to pull the ethics reform legislation from the Rules Committee and take it up provided plenty of evidence of the considerable arm twisting that was done by Assembly leaders to ensure the bill would remain bottled up. Several Republican sponsors and self-proclaimed supporters of SB 1 — including Representatives Steve Freese of Dodgeville, Eugene Hahn of Cambria, Dean Kaufert of Neenah and Terry Musser of Black River Falls — voted to kill their own bill.