Um, never mind?

Um, never mind?

After careful deliberation and consulting with my colleagues, I have decided to pull back AB 540. While I am frustrated by the amount of misinformation the bill has encountered, I believe a fair and equitable child support system, one that fundamentally recognizes the value of both parents in the upbringing of a child, is an important issue and one that warrants serious conversation.

Wisconsin state Rep. Joel Kleefisch (R, of course) got a lot of attention when it was revealed over the weekend that he had been working on a bill hand-tailored to reduce the child support payments of a wealthy donor . He has now responded by pulling the bill in question , but he still wants you to know it's all your fault for misunderstanding how awesome he is. How a bill designed to limit the amount of money wealthy people needed to pay in child support, crafted explicitly by and for a wealthy man who didn't want to pay as much in child support, fits in with the rest of that vanilla-flavored scoop of generic talking points is left to all our imaginations, as Kleefisch seems uninterested in explaining it to us. Instead, he's bravely hung his wealthy donor out to dry.

Tsk. And all the guy wanted to do was cut his child support payments, working with his fine state representatives to rewrite state law to make it happen because nothing else had worked.

While Wisconsin has become the poster state for selling laws off to the highest bidder (see: Scott Walker, Koch brothers, etc.) the more narrow lessons here are (1) that Rep. Joel Kleefisch is a very cheap hire and (2) even people trying to buy state laws are having a hard time of things of late. What's a mere millionaire to do, in a land where you have to be a damn billionaire to get a fair shake?