Frederica Freyberg:
Next week is also when that payday loan bill is expected to hit the Assembly floor. That's the subject of tonight's Capitol Insight segment, a new monthly feature here. Wisconsin Public Radio’s state capitol reporter Shawn Johnson and I share some insight into this week’s and next week’s political scene.

Shawn Johnson:
On tap for this week, the payday loan bill, a bill that Democrats said is the product of a lot of work and a lot of compromise.  

Jason Fields:
Of all the news and the things that you've been hearing, we bust our butts on this game. So it's a little disrespectful to me in light of the current drama to think we didn't work hard on this. We worked hard on this.

Frederica Freyberg:
Rep. Fields, of course the current drama he's talking about, you were at that press conference, is the fact that Speaker Mike Sheridan is having a relationship with a payday lender lobbyist. How much of policy do you think that relationship, you know, changes?

Shawn Johnson:
Well, I mean, I think he got the impression from that press conference that a lot of the Democrats who worked on this bill are obviously frustrated that the speaker's relationship has overshadowed this issue. Anyways, but you cannot help but talk about it. And part of the reason why is that when Mike Sheridan was a rank and file lawmaker, just last session he supported a bill that capped interest rates at 36 percent on payday loans. That is what consumer protection groups say is the way you do it. As speaker, he backed away from that. So for this news to come out now, it just raises questions.

Frederica Freyberg:
Yeah, it does. He was for it before he was against it. Now, everybody at the Capitol has an opinion about Speaker Mike Sheridan's shadow over the payday loan action. But we decided to go away from the Capitol and get the feeling from someone less glued to partisanship.

Shawn Johnson:
Here is what former Democratic state lawmaker and current UW-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee says about Speaker Sheridan’s situation. “Politicians have to be purer than Caesar's wife if they want to stay out of trouble. When you’re an elected official, there's no such thing as a separate private life. Everything is public. Even behavior that was at the time okay can be reinterpreted years later as not so. So I guess the standard is 101 percent transparency.” That was Mordecai Lee.

Frederica Freyberg:
Thank you. Now, in a separate matter, you know, in the just kind of “I'm just saying” category, the payday lending industry has been spending record amounts of money on campaign contributions in Wisconsin, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, forcing a woman that we talked to opposing this to say that this legislation is less compromise and more capitulation because what are some of the prongs of the bill as we know them?

Shawn Johnson:
Well, there is no 36 percent cap. There is a limit on roll-overs, but they say there's ways around that. There's also a $600 ceiling on the amount that you can take out from a loan. But talk about compromise. There's a good chance that's not going to be in the final bill. Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker signaled he doesn't care for that. He says he doesn't know who the Legislature is to tell people how much money they can borrow. So there's a good chance that a Senate bill would look different. Decker said they would be working off their own piece of legislation.

Frederica Freyberg:
First up in the Assembly next week.