We had an election last month and Republicans were replaced in statewide office. The voters spoke. Republicans not only refused to listen, but took unprecedented, unethical, undemocratic and unconstitutional methods in the darkness of night to literally flush those election results down the toilet.
Voters have had enough of one party rule over all 3 branches of our State Government. They spoke by sweeping Republicans out of every state office. Only the severe and top secret gerrymandering of our state by Republican actions prevented them from losing control over the Legislature. Statewide, Republicans were shown the door and Tammy Baldwin won re-election so easily that her race was called as the polls closed.
Like the sore losers they always are, Republicans decided that the voters no longer decide who runs our government: Wisconsin Republicans do. As they have done with their statewide gerrymandering, where the politicians select their own voters, they now want to accept only those election results they like.
They finally passed their bill at 5:22 AM after closing the Capitol hours earlier to shut out protesters. The bill was rushed over to the State Assembly for their goose-stepping party line vote. Soon, Sore Loser Scott Walker will happily sign the bill before he’s shown the door — a move that even Politico calls a full flip-flop.
If that’s not bad enough, Scott Walker just handed out 82 appointments that the State Senate rammed through last night, too.
It will be as if Scott Walker and his Attorney General Brad Schmeil refused to even leave office. Republicans will still control everything.
But…..
IT ISN’T THE END. IT’S THE BEGINNING.
Even Republicans who faithfully vote for every Republican on their ballots were sickened and horrified as the lamest of ducks used scorched earth to finally show their true faces. All the propaganda in the world which will blare out of RW radio and TV which saturate Wisconsin can’t whitewash or disguise what just happened.
Republicans in Wisconsin have ignored the results of an election they didn’t like.
They’re well known for buying elections with tens of millions of dollars of dark money; of lying, cheating, stealing, suppressing voters, intimidating voters, rigging districts through secret gerrymandering, changing election and campaign finance laws to enable their politicians to coordinate with dark money groups and any number of sleazy tactics to obtain and keep power.
They’ve never been known to do what they did last night in the wee hours. To literally disassemble to power and authority of a Governor and Attorney General that were duly elected, but not their preferred winners.
Next year in April, there will be another election for a State Supreme Court seat currently occupied by a Scott Walker appointee seeking re-election to a full 10 year term. Right now our State Supremes are dominated by RWNJs who won’t see the actions taken last night as any sort of problem. Their majority needs to be chipped away and extremist members replaced one-by-one with jurists who aren’t bound to support the GOP ideology or take money from their dark money groups.
I expect that the actions of last night will be a central theme of those campaigns since our own State Supreme Court now only supports GOP causes. Those seats were bought or stolen (or both). We will take them back over this outrage.
We still have fight left in us. And Republicans, last night, only increased our determination and the numbers of those fighting with us.
Below the fold is a list of what they did.
Here’s a list of what they did:
The legislation:
- Limits early voting to two weeks. A similar limit was found unconstitutional in 2016 and Democrats have threatened to take legal action again.
- Gives Republicans more say over the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., including over its enterprise zone program that gives tax breaks to individual businesses. WEDC's board, rather than the governor, would appoint WEDC's leader until September.
- Puts lawmakers in charge of litigation, allowing them to keep alive a lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.
- Gives lawmakers — instead of the attorney general — control over how court settlements are spent.
- Makes it easier for lawmakers to hire private attorneys at taxpayer expense when they are accused of violating the open records law or other statutes.
- Eliminates the solicitor general's office, which oversees high-profile litigation.
- Modestly lowers the state’s income tax rates next year to offset about $60 million in online sales taxes from out-of-state retailers that Wisconsin recently began collecting.
- Requires Evers to get permission from lawmakers to ban guns in the state Capitol.
- Bars judges from giving deference to state agencies’ interpretations of laws when they are challenged in court. That could make it easier to win lawsuits challenging how environmental regulations and other laws are being enforced.
- Broadens lawmakers' powers to block rules written by the Evers administration to implement state laws.
- Requires the Evers administration to report if the governor pardons anyone or his aides release anyone from prison early.
- Forces Evers to get permission from the Legislature before asking the federal government to make any changes to programs that are run jointly by the state and federal governments. That would limit the governor's flexibility in how he runs public benefits programs. If the Legislature’s budget committee determined the administration was not implementing recent changes to those programs, it could reduce funding and staffing for state agencies.
- Requires Evers to go along with a plan aimed at reducing premiums for insurance plans offered through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces for individuals.
- Channels federal money into a smaller number of state road projects, so that other projects could avoid having to comply with federal environmental and wage laws
Casualties of the extraordinary session included a proposal to move the 2020 presidential primary election to benefit the election bid of a conservative Supreme Court justice.
The reason lawmakers were returning to Madison before January in the first place also didn't make it to the floor: a tax incentive package for Fox Valley paper maker Kimberly-Clark.
UPDATE:
An interesting take on the “winners and losers” after last nights’ fiasco is here. I suggest reading in full (it isn’t long) since any block quotes would diminish the article.
Still no word on whether or not Sore Loser Scott Walker has signed this bag of BS.
My own take is that the courts aren’t going to save us. The Wisconsin State Supreme Court and US Supreme Court have RW majorities and they’ll do what they’ve been doing as our democracy is swirling down the toilet — nothing. Nothing to eliminate gerrymandering, nothing to preserve our rights to vote, nothing for 99% of us.
These people need to remember the words of JFK: that those who make democracy impossible make revolution inevitable. While those words were delivered in a speech to Latin American countries, I never thought they might apply to us in the future. I hope they don’t, but if nothing continues to be done, people are going to notice that our freedom and democracy have gone bye-bye.