Farewell, 2020

It was an awful year. Let us have Cheap Shots.

by

Let’s face it, 2020 has been among the most dispiriting years ever. As it draws to an end, millions of Americans are still not persuaded that COVID-19 is real enough to give up their God-given right to infect others. And the clear and not especially close presidential election result is still being greeted, in some quarters, with unshakable denial. 

Yet the ordeals of 2020 have proven our resilience. Millions of Americans, from overburdened health care workers to people who work in restaurants and grocery stores, showed true grit and courage. Tens of thousands of people worked the polls and on recounts to assure that the votes of their fellow citizens were dutifully recorded, only to be accused of plotting against the mad king.

With hope for all but forgiveness for none, we present this year’s annual Cheap Shot awards.

Doormat of the Year: Tony Evers

The former state school superintendent’s second year as Wisconsin’s only governor was one for the ages: a raging contagion, battered economy, police violence against people of color, and a state government that is even more divided and dysfunctional than usual. And through it all, he served as a whipping boy for anyone with a hankerin’ for cantankerin’: GOP lawmakers trying to drum up excuses for their own inaction; lawsuits to block his every move; anti-government crusaders fighting his ability to take away their freedom to be jerks. Evers got bashed for not calling out the National Guard in response to protests against police violence and trashed because he did. It’s a good thing he’s planning to give his 2021 State of the State speech online; that will cut down on the flung cabbages and rotten eggs.

Dereliction of Duty Award: Republican State Lawmakers

When the pandemic struck, state GOP leaders learned to duck. As hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites were sickened by COVID-19, some to suffer lifelong health consequences, and the death count clicked north of 4,000, they sat on their hands for more than seven months — except to block the governor’s efforts to protect the people of his state. Then, on Dec. 1, they introduced a packet of bills that do mostly bad things: set a mandatory reopen date for schools and a return to unsafe workplaces for state employees; grant immunity to businesses that endanger the public; and restrict the ability of local governments to curtail reckless conduct. Want proof that partisan redistricting is bad for democracy? These legislators provide it.

Most Cruelly Insensitive and Shockingly Tone Deaf Remark: Robin Vos

Here’s how the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly expressed his deep and abiding concern for the tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents who are now, through no fault of their own, in dire straits: “I certainly am empathetic with folks who are out of work and need to find a position to be able to pay their bills, but in a state like Wisconsin, where so many jobs go wanting every day, any incentive that we put in place which lets people stay on government assistance to pay their mortgage, as opposed to finding a new job to do the same thing, is really counterproductive to helping our economy grow.” Thanks, pal.

Double-Take Award: Robin Vos

So here is the same Assembly speaker, less than a week later, expounding on an audit that faulted the Evers administration’s handling of unemployment benefits: “The lack of urgency to help the unemployed is inexcusable and unconscionable.”

Loser of the Year: Dan Kelly

Appointed to the state Supreme Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016, this right-wing religious extremist faced state voters for the first time this spring, on a record that included likening affirmative action to slavery and blasting the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage as an “illegitimate exercise of state power.” He also repeatedly spewed contempt for the idea of government help to people in need (“This is how we breed resentment: Take from those who create and give it to people who don’t”), a singularly offensive stance amid a pandemic. Kelly was defeated by Dane County Judge Jill Karofsky, eroding the court’s conservative majority, and setting the stage for a possible future shift in court control. Thank God.

Most Divisive State Politicians: Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald

The Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly and soon-to-be-former majority leader of the state Senate have long been extreme partisans and bare-knuckled bullies. Their idea of a fair fight is to punch you until you stop moving and then start kicking you. This year, the pair led the charge against state efforts to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic, and helped gin up Trump’s delusion that he won the election, despite all of those votes for Biden. In response to zero evidence of significant electoral fraud, Vos called on an Assembly committee to investigate the state’s elections and then went trolling for “concerned citizens” to file complaints about the misconduct they imagined. Fitzgerald is headed to Washington as a newly elected U.S. state representative. He’ll fit right in.

Conspiracy Theorist of the Year: Ron Johnson

Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. senator has repeatedly embarrassed the Badger State with his embrace of outlandish lies. He fantasized in August about “corruption at the highest levels of, certainly, the FBI.” He groused in October, after COVID-19 had killed more than 200,000 Americans, that the public had “been snookered into this mass hysteria that isn’t even close to the real risk.” After the Nov. 3 election, Johnson sent a stern letter to Google falsely alleging that it targeted only liberal users with Get Out the Vote reminders, a claim based on the musings of Robert Epstein (or, as Johnson carelessly identified him in a tweet, “Richard Epstein”), a proponent of arranged marriages considered “notoriously unqualified” to arrive at such judgments. He privately confided that he knew Trump lost the election but was pretending otherwise for political reasons, then held a Senate hearing to further promote baseless claims of election fraud. If Johnson breaks the promise he made in 2016 and decides to run again in 2022, Wisconsin voters might just conspire to remove him.

The Grift that Keeps on Taking Award: Foxconn

This Taiwanese electronics giant secured potentially billions of dollars in state subsidies by promising to create up to 13,000 jobs at a new plant in Southeast Wisconsin that President Trump hailed as “the eighth wonder of the world.” In fact, through the end of 2019, the plant had hired just 281 people, who, according to a recent report in The Verge, served merely to secure tax credits and “sat in their cubicles watching Netflix”— and definitely not on large-screen TVs that Foxconn once promised to build in Wisconsin.

Hypocrite of the Year: Jim Troupis

Long favored by state Republicans and appointed for a while as a Dane County judge, this Cross Plains lawyer clinched this fiercely competitive category with his bogus legal challenge arguing that all the state’s in-person absentee ballots should be declared fraudulent and disallowed, even though this was the manner in which both he and his wife cast their own votes. Both of their names appeared on exhibits he submitted listing allegedly illegal votes. Troupis’s baseless pleading was, of course, rejected. 

Most Ardent Enemy of Reality: Tom Tiffany 

This former state lawmaker who graduated to Congress reaffirmed his crackpot credentials when he was one of just 18 members of the House of Representatives to vote against a resolution condemning the conspiracy-theory purveyors QAnon. He then became the lone member of the state’s congressional delegation to support a legal brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the results of the presidential election — a ploy so bat-shit crazy that the High Court, including all three of Trump’s appointees, rejected it unanimously. The constituents Tiffany sought to disenfranchise ought to keep that in mind the next time he asks for their vote.

Blood on Their Hands Award: Wisconsin Supreme Court

Despite a statute that clearly gives state officials the power to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases,” the court’s conservative majority repeatedly sided with GOP lawmakers and conservative groups to block Gov. Tony Evers from imposing statewide constraints to curb the spread of COVID-19, with Justice Rebecca Bradley branding these efforts “the very definition of tyranny.” Let’s be clear: These actions by the court’s conservative judicial activists led to more people getting sick, and more people dying. For shame.

The “Oops, Did I Just Say That?” Award: Patience Roggensack

The chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, during oral arguments on Evers’ stay at home order, dismissed stated concerns about a deadly outbreak of COVID-19 in Brown County, noting that it was centered around a meatpacking plant with a largely Latino workforce and thus not “the regular folks.” The good news is: It will be the entire state, and not just the regular folks, who will get to decide whether to vote for Roggensack should she seek reelection in 2023.

Most Incoherent Protest: June 23 Melee

Shortly before the death of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, Madison protesters showed how little they grasped all that talk about nonviolence. Hundreds of people took part in tearing down two state Capitol statues, one meant to salute the state’s progress on women’s rights and the other of a prominent abolitionist who died fighting the Confederacy. Smaller groups set fire to a public building that had people inside and beat up a Democratic state lawmaker for taking pictures. The blowback to these acts, and to the trashing of businesses on State Street, was appropriately sour. Way to go, people.

Hurry Up Please It’s Time Award: Josh Kaul

On August 23, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, leaving him paralyzed, as he stepped into a car that held his three young children; it was all caught on video. Kaul’s Department of Justice immediately launched an investigation to determine whether to recommend any charges against the cop, Rusten Sheskey. In mid-September, Kaul declared that the probe was in its “final stages.” But as of now, not a word. What is our attorney general waiting for? A full confession? An eighth bullet in the back? The next election? 

Worst. Hero. Ever. Award

Lawyers defending the Illinois teen charged with shooting three people protesting Blake’s killing in Kenosha, killing two of them, are portraying their client as a national hero. “Kyle Rittenhouse will go down in American history” with other patriots, tweeted one of his attorneys, adding “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.” In a television appearance, the attorneys called Rittenhouse a “shining symbol of the American fighting spirit.” With heroes like these, who needs pathetic, misguided, violent punks?

Oops-a-Daisy Award: Satya Rhodes-Conway

Madison’s mayor stepped in it big time when she released a private video to the city’s police officers commiserating with them over how hard it can be to have others “constantly insult your chosen profession,” with nary a word of about how people are upset because cops routinely abuse their authority and kill people, minorities in particular, without consequence. Rhodes-Conway apologized, which angered the cops and their defenders. “STOP KOWTOWING,” a pro-police group chided. Here’s something for the mayor to remember. The only way to win a no-win game is to not play.

Pottymouth of the Year: Person Unknown 

At a Sept. 1 Madison city council meeting, held via Zoom and as recorded on YouTube, someone can be heard muttering the word “c---” after a female member of the public has been called on to speak. Some alderpersons said it sounded like Ald. Paul Skidmore, who denied it, prompting the council to authorize spending up to $10,000 on a forensic investigation to identify the culprit (still pending after more than two months — apparently this is the gnarliest probe since the assassination of JFK). Really, people? Have the last four years of Donald Trump so degraded our sense of civil discourse that conservatives … oh, wait.

Runner-up: Francesca Hong

In mid-October, two weeks before this Democrat was elected to represent Madison in the state Legislature, she fired off an angry tweet calling members of the state Tavern League “corrupt, crooked c---s.” Way to elevate the level of discussion! Hong refused to apologize and called criticism of her use of this word “sexist hypocrisy.” She even put the blame on “my soon to be colleagues across the aisle,” saying “Wisconsinites deserve better.” That’s right, representative. They do.

Drunken Frat-Boy Wannabes of the Year: Paul Tittl and Shae Sortwell

For a while it looked as though the one and only upside to COVID-19 was Evers’ decision to forgo an official holiday tree in the state Capitol Rotunda, which, The Associated Press noted, “could mean a hiatus from the annual fight over whether to call it a Christmas tree.” But these two Republican state lawmakers couldn’t let it go at that. Instead they lied and broke the rules to twice install Christmas trees that the state then removed — to distract from the life-or-death crisis they helped create. Happy Festivus.

In Memoriam:

Shirley Abrahamson: Wisconsin’s longest tenured and most intellectually formidable Supreme Court justice died Dec. 19 at age 87 after a long struggle with cancer. The state’s first woman justice and first woman chief justice, she served with distinction for 43 years — as a defender of fairness, due process, and transparency. Replaced as chief justice by a conservative-led cabal in 2015, she declined to run for reelection in 2019, when her illness made this necessary. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who also died this year, once said that Abrahamson was, among U.S. jurists, “the very best, the most courageous and sage, the least self-regarding,” adding “She never forgets the people law exists (or should exist) to serve.” Let’s hope we never forget her.

Karl Harter: Many years ago, when preparing to interview this Madison author and businessman about his nonfiction book on a notorious pair of Madison murders, an Isthmus reporter had so many questions that began “How do you know …?” that he shortened it to “HDYK … ?” The book, later made into a movie that was not its equal, was packed with revelatory detail. Harter died after a two-decade battle with a rare form of cancer on Jan. 28 at age 68. “Cancer is a brutal disease,” he once wrote. “It has altered my life, but not my spirit. I have been scarred but not broken.” He fought it until there was no more point. Recalled his wife, Christina, “He lived on his own terms and died on his own terms.”

Milele Chikasa Anana: The founder and publisher of the Madison-based and -focused UMOJA Magazine was a force of nature — “sympathetic and relentless at the same time,” as the Rev. Alex Gee, another local civil rights leader, expressed it. Anana’s efforts to help others earned her the nickname “Village Mother.” In 1974, she became the first African American in Wisconsin elected to serve on a local school board. She was also Madison’s first affirmative action officer, and an interim director of the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission. And, as The Capital Times noted in its article on her death on May 6 at age 86, “In 2009, she was awarded the city of Madison's Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award, but she missed the celebration to attend Barack Obama’s inauguration.” She left a legacy as great as her life.

John Odom: This Madison civil rights defender and role model for other local leaders understood that the struggle for racial justice was a work in progress. So even as he received such honors as the city’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and the James C. Wright Human Rights Award, he kept his focus on the work ahead, telling The Capital Times “Too many people involved in the civil rights movement believe that most of the work has been done.” He died Oct. 30 at age 72, leaving a few things for the rest of us to tend to.

Renata Laxova: One of the most remarkable people in Madison died Nov. 30 at age 89. She fled the Nazis in her native Czechoslovakia at age eight, one of 669 Jewish children granted safe harbor in England thanks to the efforts of a young Brit named Nicholas Winton. She went on to become a renowned geneticist at UW-Madison, and traveled the world to talk about her work and past. The mother of two daughters, she was a radiant presence in her north-side Madison neighborhood, along with her beloved dogs, Mischa and Breenie. As her obituary noted, she was “kind, gracious, compassionate, generous, like a mother or grandmother to many, and an amazing listener during tough times.” What a great life. What a great loss.

Carl DuRocher: This long-time Madison disability rights activist used his position on the city’s Transit and Parking Commission to ensure that buses had wheelchair lifts and taxi companies provided accessible service. DuRocher, who repaired computers without the use of his hands to donate to Indigenous people, moved to Madison as a college student, back in the days when the city had no transit system for riders with disabilities. Besides his work with the city, he served on advisory committees for the UW-Madison, forcefully and effectively advancing the rights of people with disabilities. He died Jan. 5 at age 73.