Republican Legislator Commits No Fowl

Among these birds of a feather, the robin says he is no parrot.

State Rep. Bobin Vos, (R-Burlington), co-chair of Joint Finance and manager of a tainted redistricting process, gave the Journal Sentinel a novel way of denying he was a mere parrot of a GOP attorney who wrote talking points for GOP legislators that said, 'no chirping about all this' - - and who worked with Vos to recruit Republican legislators into signing a written pledge at the lawyer's office against disclosing the makeup of redrawn election maps the lawyers were proposing:

Rep. Robin Vos acknowledged Wednesday that talking points were created for him last year that told Republicans to ignore public comments on new election maps.

But Vos, one of the Assembly's top leaders, downplayed the memo's significance and said he simply told other Republicans they should not listen to Democrats on the issue - a claim that critics called implausible.

Vos said he did not know why the half-page memo was phrased the way it was. He also distanced himself from other parts of the memo...

"(the attorney) put that in the memo but it was not one I agreed with or used," Vos said. "It doesn't mean just because he wrote them down I was a parrot."