Fortunately, they were in the minority. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 6-4 to instruct the state auditor to find out what has come of Gov. Tony Evers’ 2019 order to make “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, a central feature of agencies’ plans and to corral every state employee into “mandatory equity and inclusion training.”
This means the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau will — I’m paraphrasing — find out what agencies did to obey the governor, how much they spent doing it, and what has resulted.
Who could be afraid of that?
Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), for one: As the committee prepared to vote on Tuesday, he could hold his tongue no more. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said before saying he was a history major, that asking whether the governor’s orders were effective would “hurt veterans,” and that he saw the audit “as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try and get people to think a specific way.”
What way would that be? Carpenter cited the earlier remarks by the committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), saying, “I thought it was kind of far right-wing, and that kind of tells us the intention of the audit.”
a measure of how DEI has become something akin to a religion in the Democratic Party that, instead of embracing a chance to see DEI vindicated, they’re attacking the audit. All four Democrats on the committee that oversees audits voted against it and Gov. Tony Evers’ office blasted it as a “weaponization” of the audit process. Evers himself has said that it doesn’t matter what the audit finds. He won’t change anything. In other words, he already believes DEI is right and no amount of data will convince him otherwise. That, folks, is religious zeal.
“I see this as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try to get people to think a specific way,” said Sen. Tim Carpenter, a Democratic member of the audit committee. But the whole point of the criticism of DEI is that it tries to get people to think in a very specific way. That’s the cause for the legitimate concern. If Carpenter were confident that the audit will disprove that concern then why wouldn’t he be for it?