Vintage movie fans enjoy stories about the bizarre screenplay changes during the late 1930s and early ’40s after Hollywood studios imposed the Motion Picture Production Code, in an effort to clean up their image and remove content some audiences would find objectionable.
It now seems our Republican legislators have adapted the same philosophy in crafting their state budget bill. In the past couple months we’ve seen them propose and then summarily discard language that would abolish the Legislative Audit Bureau, eliminate the Wisconsin Idea from the University of Wisconsin System’s mission statement, weaken the state’s pioneering open records law and politicize the board that oversees the nation’s best-run public pension system.