During an interview last night with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, Wisconsin state senator Glenn Grothman called the protestors at the Capitol "slobs" and claimed the building had been turned into a "pigsty". He then insisted that everyone at the Capitol were just a group of "college students having a fun party".
To further explain his opinion of the firefighters, nurses, teachers, students, and other average Wisconsin citizens engaged in the protests,yesterday Grothman testified during the ongoing hearing about the curtailment of Capitol building access that the protestors were abnormal.
"Normal people don't sit cross-legged on the floor and bang on drums," he said in court. "It's an uncivil situation."
This should come as no surprise to those of us from Wisconsin who know how little Grothman thinks of Madison natives in general. Or victims of rape. Or woman wanting to use contraception to prevent pregnancy. Or 4 year old children. In his painfully long career as first an assembly member then a state senator,Grothman has voted against the Compassionate Care for Victims of Rape Bill, that requires emergency care hospitals to provide rape victims with the FDA approved, non-prescription medications (like Plan B) to prevent pregnancy following their sexual assault. The bill fortunately passed.
Grothman also voted against a bill that would have required insurers to cover treatment of autism, voted against allowing judges to award damages for sexual discrimination, voted against a bill reducing unnecessary toxic mercury hazards, and has been a long time opponent of 4 year old kindergarten, claiming incorrectly that the benefits "don't last".
He also had been on a recent tirade against the city of Madison and its mayor Dave Cieslewicz, claiming that the liberal policies of current and former mayors has led to incompetent snow plowing in the city.
How conservative is Grothman? Well, Americans for Prosperity actually applauded him for his climate change denial stances, that's how conservative he is. And in my personal favorite Grothman moment, he bemoaned a Princeton Review report from 2009 that named the UW Law school as one of the most liberal law schools in the country. Why, you ask, did that bother Mr. Grothman? Because the liberal nature of the law school meant that it was not conservative enough. Get it?
“I am very disappointed that the UW Law School has done such an abysmal job of promoting diversity among their students,” Grothman said.
He added he thinks it is “shameful” that the university is so unrepresentative of the state, which he said contains more conservatives than liberals.
“In a university that prides itself on diversity it would be nice if the political views of faculty and students represented the state’s constituents,” Grothman said.
Grothman was, unfortunately, surrounded by a mob of protestors on Tuesday when he himself was unable to find entrance to the building. In a very tense moment captured on film by Madison's Isthmus contributer Phil Ejercito, the crowd was visibly hostile and the cameraman himself voiced his own concerns that the crowd could have gotten out of control. Largely thanks to the efforts of Democratic state Representative Brett Hulsey, who stepped in between the crowd and Grothman and defused the situation, the situation ended with the crowd dispersing and Husley and Grothman entering the building without further troubles. The most damaging thing that will come out of this incident will be the conservative blogapalooza that will result, with cries about "union thugs" and "violent protestors" and "chaos", as if one brief incident of outrage and tension against a small-minded man completely outweighs the weeks of impeccably peaceful demonstrations taking place here.