I've been paying attention to election events in Wisconsin with only half an eye, but today the New York Times caught me up on the whole sordid affair. In a nutshell, Republicans want to abolish a bipartisan election commission and instead put all voting decisions in the hands of Republicans. Remarkably, there's not even a made-up excuse for this. They just want to do it:
The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.
....And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections....Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.
That's basically it. Democrats are cheaters—even though their own report said otherwise—so Republicans should unilaterally control all election decisions.
Welcome to the modern Republican Party. This is what Democrats should be fighting: not early voting or mail voting or photo IDs or any of that stuff. They should instead introduce a voting bill that focuses solely on the oversight of elections, making it clear that oversight should be nonpartisan and entirely out of the hands of legislatures. Even hard core Republicans are largely taken aback when they hear about this stuff, and it would cost Republicans dearly to fight a common sense bill like this.
"Even hard core Republicans are largely taken aback when they hear about this stuff, and it would cost Republicans dearly to fight a common sense bill like this."
Obviously they're not, or their preferred candidates wouldn't be pushing this stuff. C'mon Kevin, by now you must know that "rigging elections" or "racism" aren't dealbreakers for Republican voters... they don't know it's happening, do know but don't care, or do know and support it. There are absolutely no Republican voters who do know what the party is doing and don't support what they know.
I honestly never thought I'd see the day where I wished that more Republicans would be like Liz Cheney, but here I am.
Or that more would die of Covid. Literally.
You know, Ron Johnson is never going to have to be accountable for a vote on a stinker like that, because he holds a Federal office, not one in the WI government, where he would have a say.
So, he's posturing, playing for the crowd. He should be ashamed, but obviously, he isn't.
Also, following the script he got from Putin on July 4, 2018.
Two closely related points:
First, whether Kevin’s right or wrong about what the Democrats should do is besides the point. They aren’t squandering their scare political resources on the things Kevin disdains instead of wisely advancing the measures he considers better. The Democrats aren’t doing any of these things because they’re assuming that masses of people will selflessly endure whatever the GOP throws at them so voter suppression, gerrymandering, and even physical violence will make no difference. The Democrats plan is to “out-organize” the voter suppression, the gerrymandering m and the physical violence.
Second, I think Kevin’s being a touch Panglossian when he says that even moderate Republicans will be happy to legislate themselves out of the jobs and their political out of existence. What we’ve very consistently seen is that there’s simply no bottom to Republicans dépravée or capacity for evil.
And the idea that Republicans will need to rally to the democratic cause out of self interest misunderstands the authoritarian nature of the Republican Party. By leveraging the antidémocratique flaws in our constitution and political system, Republicans don’t need to win majorities. It’s been reliably assessed that through the present gerrymandering alone, the Republicans will get at least five more seats in the house (and almost certainly enough to make a Republican speaker of the house) even if they do not win even a single vote more than in the last election.
Nope. Gerrymandering works both ways. But your too stupid to realize it.
You're too stupid to use the correct "your/you're" in a sentence.
They're not even pretending not to be authoritarian thugs anymore. It's who they are. Just break out the truncheons and brownshits and get it over with.
What gets me is that they continue to be wildly popular with the voting population. Or, at the very least, popular enough to be able to cheat themselves into power.
They represent maybe 35-40 percent of the electorate but without the senate, electoral college, and very aggressive gerrymandering they’d never have control of any branch of the federal government. Certainly the Republicans would never win a presidential election.
The other peculiar thing is that the Republicans are increasingly a party obsessively and relentlessly focused on an unending and increasingly trivial culture war. It’s rare for Republicans to campaign on substance or policy issues. They’re increasingly disinterested in governance and, consequently, increasingly incapable of actually fulfilling the responsibilities of their offices.
I’m not sue that a powerfully focused, skillful, and nimble opposition party could derail the Republicans relentless campaign for authoritarianism but the Democrats are none of those things and that’s why I’m so pessimistic.
Rod Dreher endorses the Wisconsin GQP's embrace of Orbanism. But not like a gay embrace, between two men.
But let us never forget that the Third Reich had by far the better uniforms and an extremely vibrant cabaret culture.
They were Hugo Boss bitches.
But not at all gay, of course. Conservatives are the most manly of men and Nazis the most masculine of all.
And let's not forgt the near-lethal levels of projection involved in Republican rhetoric. I'm reasonably sure, based on my contact with R voters, that they actually believe this stuff: that only Democrats lie and they do it all the time, that only Democrats are racists and they're the absolute worst, that only Democrats cheat and they do it in every election, that only Democrats run for office to make as much (embezzled) money as humanly possible and they all do it.
Also, that all Republicans are salt-of-the-earth, good folks who care for others with Christian charity and love, that all Republicans are totally non-racist in any way of any skin color, that all Republican office holders are selfless public servants, and that the news media always gives the commie/libral perpective on everything.
It's a total Bizarro World when Rs and Ds get together. It's left me speechless at times.
Lol, sure there are "racists" that "D". Single issue voters. Are you that stupid to know that???? I mean, at some point ignorance must die.
You can't even write clearly enough to make you'reself understood.
I honestly think that Glenn Yungkins's 17 year old son trying to vote, twice, on election day wasn't just an overzealous child looking out for dad, but rather an ineligible voter dispatched by dad & dad's campaign in the hopes he would be allowed to vote. Then, Yungkins would have an actual voter fraud case to trumpet, & go beyond, saying, "My son didn't act alone. If the Virginia election apparatus is so derelict that it can't catch a teenager trying to vote, Lord only knows what else it misses".
Nailed it, that's my suspicion as well - they wanted proof positive of "voting irregularities" but nope Fairfax County voting officers are top notch so it didn't happen.
Right out of the Roger Stone-Lee Atwater-Tad Devine swamp consultants llc playbook.
Then kill them. Capture Johnson and torture, mutilate him on youtube. He will start talking. He can handle pain.
I volunteer to Whitmer him.
As someone who lives in Wisconsin, let me give you all the lowdown:
What's going on is dispute within the party between the crazies who still believe the election fraudulent and the people with still some sanity left (although not much) who know Biden won but can't admit it because the crazies will come after them in a primary or phone in death threats to their house. So you have a little sanity left State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos trying to use an investigation he initiated that isn't really designed to discover voter fraud that would overturn the election but just appears that way. And he's spending a lot of the legislature's budget to do so (over $700,000). He's trying to head off the crazies but of course they're not buying it. And thus you have this crazy Sheriff of Racine County wanting to arrest member of the WEC, including the Republican members, for fraud, you have the leading GOP candidate for governor suing the members of the commission no to posture to the crazies because she's a crazy and is so bad even Trump wants to dump her for someone else and you have this nobody state assemblyman demanding the legislature vote decertify the state's electoral vote which it cannot do and the leadership had to tell him this personally. As WEC member and former legislator Dean Knudtson said "They're just looking for a scapegoat for what happened in 2020."
What Sen. Johnson is proposing is basically a compromise: the crazies may not get their decertification or their show trials but at least they'll know the next time the party will be in complete charge of running elections. This, of course, can only happen if Gov. Evers loses next year, so if you want any reason to vote for him, there you go. While not super popular, the antics of GOP have the party very unpopular in Wisconsin right now, which is why Evers doesn't do all that bad in polling match ups and even Biden would beat Trump here (again, right now).
I grew up in Wisconsin, WTF is going on?
I remember, although I was just a kid, the urban rural divide, but as a charter member of a small, about 1,500 person town, I don't remember any animosity towards big cities.
I mean, big cities were big, and if you'd rather live in a small town and sit around ice fishing all winter so you didn't have to talk to your wife, well by golly that's what you did.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. There’s simply no way that Biden wins Wisconsin in 2024 or the Democrats win statewide races no matter how many votes they get. If, for example, Trump gets significantly too few votes in 2024, the Republicans will simply award him Wisconsin’s electoral college votes and there’s nothing anyone can do about it short of a civil war.
Think paradigm shift: votes aren’t necessary, controlling the extremely gerrymandered state legislatures is what matters.
The Republican Party in Wisconsin and other states would be on firmer ground, I believe, were they to change state law in advance of the election to explicitly give the power to allocate presidential electors to the (democratically-elected, after all) legislature and simply cancel the popular vote for president. Such a move is undeniably legal under our constitution.
It's possible and maybe even likely that Republicans will get away with naked elections nullification after the election. But an attempt to do so would invite federal litigation, and it's conceivable five justices would prefer that the US avoid a descent into dictatorship. As elites with plenty of personal freedom, money and high quality of life, people like them would have a lot to lose, after all. (I mean, just how bad could life possibly be under the status quo for Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh?)
I think it’s think it’s highly the Wisconsin legislature will do exactly what you’re saying. Except that the Wisconsin legislature is not “democratically” elected in any meaningful sense of the word. Gerrymandering has made it nearly impossible for Republicans to be dislodged even though Democrats frequently receive more votes. The Democrats had two years to attack this and did absolutely nothing. Now, they’re locked out of the state and it’s electoral college votes will automatically go to Trump.
Similarly, the notion that some Republicans will do their jobs honestly (which is what saved Biden) and that’s what the Democrats should count upon is hopelessly Panglossian. There’s been a dangerous assault on election officials from the Republicans to intimidate them and replace them insofar as possible with party loyalists. To which threat the Democrats have replied with crickets.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/13/america-is-full-of-democracy-deserts-wisconsin-rivals-congo-on-some-metrics
And specifically on Wisconsin as a harbinger of the apocalypse facing the Democrats of which they seem blissfully ignorant, this is a really excellent article and I highly recommend it:
https://theweek.com/politics/1007325/democrats-are-in-denial-about-what-theyre-up-against?utm_source=links&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=twitter
"They should instead introduce a voting bill that focuses solely on the oversight of elections, making it clear that oversight should be nonpartisan and entirely out of the hands of legislatures."
Makes perfect sense. A slow-rolling coup at many levels of government could be far more dangerous than Trump's clumsy attempt at a coup.
It's strange that a large chunk of the white working class had banded together to bring insanity to our politics. And sadly, this has really harmed the image of the white working class and rural whites. I know I won't be moving to the country.
> Even hard core Republicans are largely taken aback when they hear about this stuff
I haven't seen any evidence of that.
" If, for example, Trump gets significantly too few votes in 2024, the Republicans will simply award him Wisconsin’s electoral college votes and there’s nothing anyone can do about it short of a civil war."
If that shit's happening, then yeah, we are in for civil conflict if after the voters render their verdict, the legislature steps in to award the electoral votes to another candidate, which is illegal to begin with and which is why it didn't happen in 2020 and why even the current GOP leaderships swats these harebrained ideas down.
"this is a really excellent article and I highly recommend it"
No it's not an excellent article and I highly recommend you skip it because its alarmist written by someone who could be a flashing DO MORE/NOT ENOUGH sign, hates the Democratic Party to begin with and is a professed socialist. Notice, he's not asking the Green Party to take action here.
America since at least the Populist Era (1880s-90s) has been a nation predicated on leftists & the GQP hating liberals more even than wanting their policies implemented. It's why I find the political discourse of the Defector-dot-com staff exhausting & selfserving (almost to a person they are upper middle class, or richer, "failchildren" (to use their word) who mouth #OurRevolution pieties while doing everything they can electorally to make sure the Neoliberal Institutional Democrat Party loses, even if that means the hardright wins). It's also why I think that same Defector staff would actually get on smashingly with their archrival & onetime coworker KKKlay Travis: the erstwhile algore2000 volunteer, in his Southern Trad triumphalism, posits a worldview not out of place in the William Jennings Bryan/Eugene Debs nostalgist fantasies of the Defectorate. KKKlay may be a hardcore MAGAT now, his residual regional Democrat Party support broken in three acts -- getting a law degree from a fancy school, but instead of making the big bucks at a white shoe firm, being reduced to practicing ambulance predation in the US Virgin Islands; the subordination of John Edwards to the no. 2 spot on the 2004 Democrat ticket; & the election of a Black president in 2008* who was a funny named probable Muslin, allegedly from Hawaii & definitely radicalized in Chicago at NOI Mosque No. 1 (KKKlay might have been able to be saved from his descent into becoming the Propaganda Minister for the New Confederacy had the first Black president in 2008 been Harold Ford, Jr., or J.C. Watts) -- but in his heart, he's ultimately just about pwning the libz. So too the Defectors.
*Conversely, the leftist white Defectorate, while then at Deadspin in 2008, were broken by the election of a Black president who wasn't the Black nationalist anarcho-socialist whom they had been pining for since hearing It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back during college first year. When Barry Hussein Osama turned out to be Bob Kerrey with the full use of his legs, the Defectors were crestfallen.
Never tell a Progressive they can't scream for the inclusion of their personal pet rocks.
Or that Kyle Rittenhouse fetishists like Glemm Greemwald, Tulsi Gabbard, & Michael Tracey are something other than progressive.
it would cost Republicans dearly to fight a common sense bill like this.
Good Lord. Has Drum been taking gullible pills by the handful?