Tommy Washbush / Freepik Assets
Illustration of elephant representing a bit of taming for GOP overreach
In mid-January, a Dane County judge rebuked Republicans in the state Legislature for seeking to fire Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe for doing her job.
“The Legislature has fanned the hyper-partisan flames by engaging in several high-profile unequivocal official acts to purportedly remove Administrator Wolfe,” wrote Judge Ann Peacock in a blistering decision that turned her earlier temporary order into a permanent injunction. She blasted the body’s “willingness to attempt actions contrary to the law.”
In September, the state Senate voted to fire Wolfe, with every single Republican member voting in favor, even though Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu conceded both beforehand and afterward that it lacked the authority to do so.
Why are the Republicans hell-bent on dumping Wolfe, said by the Associated Press, in a news story, to be “one of the most respected elections leaders in the nation”? LeMahieu says it’s because “Wisconsinites have expressed concerns with the administration of elections.”
Peacock, in her ruling, slapped down this argument, saying it “wholly ignores the Defendants’ own role in undermining the ‘public confidence in the integrity and reliability of the state’s elections.’”
Peacock’s ruling is subject to appeal, but perhaps not in time to achieve the GOP’s goal of making a mess of the 2024 election process — thereby helping the party’s maximum leader, Donald Trump, to declare election fraud if he doesn’t win. Still, there is no sign that Republicans intend to change the way they do business, at least not voluntarily.
In the days after this decision was released, Senate Republicans again voted to fire Tyler Huebner, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ appointee to the Public Service Commission, for favoring lower rates for poorer utility customers. It continues a trend of the appointment rejections meant to frustrate Evers’ ability to govern. In October, Senate Republicans spurned eight gubernatorial appointments, including that of former Milwaukee County Clerk Joseph Czarnezki to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. (Full disclosure: Czarnezki was my grade school basketball coach at St. Stephen in Milwaukee. Fuller disclosure: We once lost a game to St. Robert by a score, as I recall, of 72-0.)
“This is insanity, and this is an issue of democracy — Republicans have to stop doing this,” Evers said in a statement on Czarnezki’s rejected appointment, apparently unaware of his troubled coaching past. The governor continued:
“I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or otherwise, these Wisconsinites are completely qualified to do the job they’ve been asked to do, and they are volunteering their time, talent, and expertise without pay to serve their neighbors and our state. Harassing them, belittling them, and publicly firing them just because Republicans have decided that’s the way they want politics to work these days, well, that’s just plain wrong.”
Evers is right. The smashmouth style of politics practiced by Republicans in Wisconsin is not in anybody’s interest. It’s a function of having too much power and too little accountability. It’s bad for Wisconsin and bad even for Republicans, who may someday find themselves on the receiving end of the mouth-smashing.
Look at the way Republicans in Wisconsin undermined efforts to promote diversity within the Universities of Wisconsin. LeMahieu and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos did not persuade the university brass or the Board of Regents that moving away from efforts to promote diversity was a good thing. They simply used their power to extort the changes they sought, by holding up funding for a new UW-Madison engineering building and previously approved pay raises for some 34,000 system employees.
This is not leadership. It’s the abuse of power.
But there are signs that things are changing, in large part due to the election last year of Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, which tipped control of the court to liberals for the first time in decades. (Don’t let anyone tell you it was just 15 years; Justice Patrick Crooks was not a liberal; he just voted with them on a handful of cases.) This has led to a prompt reconsideration of the state’s voter boundaries, which since 2011 have been drawn to heavily favor Republicans.
While the proposed new maps now under consideration will likely not deliver the Legislature into Democratic control, given the state’s political geography, they could dramatically increase the number of competitive districts. In response, Republicans recently passed amended maps that one Democrat referred to as a “last-ditch, disingenuous and desperate attempt to hold on to power.” Evers vetoed these maps Jan. 30.
Republicans are screaming bloody murder about the unfairness of it all, but that’s just because the unfairness they have become accustomed to is threatened. No longer can they count on the state Supreme Court to rubber stamp their agenda, as it did in disallowing the use of absentee ballot drop boxes that had been used without problems for many years. They might even yet have to pay a price for blackmailing the UW into submission on diversity, in a still-pending lawsuit filed by Evers.
The days of state Republicans being able to do whatever they want and get away with it may be coming to an end. And that’s good news for Wisconsin.
Bill Lueders, Isthmus news editor from 1986 to 2011, is the former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive.
