Tommy Washbush
It’s kick-off time for another presidential election year and the leading Republican candidate is borrowing talking points from Adolf Hitler. Who said politics couldn’t get any worse?
If 2023 clarified anything it’s that the Republican party has been completely taken over by conspiracy theorists and outright fascists — not a single Republican in Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation, nor a single Republican leader in the Legislature, has denounced GOP frontrunner Donald Trump for calling his political opponents “vermin” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Buckle your seatbelt for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer, where white supremacist militia types are sure to show up both on and off stage.
One bright spot at the end of 2023 was the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision that our state’s gerrymandered voting maps are unconstitutional. The court has promised to choose new maps in time for the 2024 elections. That could mean our purple state, where voters are pretty evenly split between the two major political parties, might no longer have to suffer under supermajority control by a Republican legislative majority that doesn’t care what the public thinks.
Another bright spot: Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors who cast phony Electoral College ballots for Donald Trump admitted as part of a court settlement that they were trying to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 election and that, yes, President Joe Biden actually won.
The stakes could not be higher this year. One party is boldly attacking the basic institutions of our democracy in order to prop up minority rule, while the other is representing the majority of voters in both Wisconsin and the United States who believe in voting rights, reproductive rights, and a society where people are not threatened and persecuted because of their ancestry.
On abortion rights, Wisconsin got a reprieve in 2023 when Dane County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schlipper made a surprise ruling that the 1849 law that had been interpreted as outlawing abortion did not, in fact, apply to a consensual abortion procedure, but only to violent attacks on pregnant women that result in fetal death.
Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski grudgingly said he would abide by the decision. But Urmanski is already appealing the case having previously promised to prosecute anyone involved in providing an abortion under the 1849 law.
Even though Planned Parenthood has restarted abortion services in Sheboygan, Milwaukee and Madison, the battle is not over.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is pushing for a statewide ballot measure to make abortion illegal in Wisconsin after 12 to 15 weeks instead of the current 20 weeks. And while Evers has vowed to veto that measure, and voters have repeatedly demonstrated they are not fans of GOP meddling with their private medical decisions, we are not out of the woods.
Wisconsin is not that far from Texas, where an arrogant attorney general and religious fanatics on the right wing Texas Supreme Court blocked a young mother, Kate Cox, from receiving an abortion after her third pregnancy went terribly wrong. With her health deteriorating and a fatal abnormality guaranteeing her baby would be born dead or die in utero, Cox pleaded for help. A judge agreed she qualified for an exemption from Texas’ draconian abortion ban. But Attorney General Ken Paxton contacted her doctors to warn them that he would prosecute them under Texas’ felony abortion ban if they gave Cox the care she was seeking. The Texas Supreme Court, led by a judge who has bragged about protesting outside abortion clinics and about his wife carrying a dangerous pregnancy to term only to watch the baby die within hours, backed Paxton.
These are the same dire circumstances that confronted pregnant women and their doctors in Wisconsin up until the recent court reprieve. And they could return if the Republicans and the anti-abortion fanatics have their way.
Our legislature has even entertained a “bounty law” modeled on the Texas statute that rewards neighbors who hunt down the friends and loved ones of abortion patients. Anyone successfully prosecuted as an accessory to an out-of-state abortion yields a cash bounty for the nosy neighbors.
This is the dystopia Republicans envision for Wisconsin.
Fortunately, voters in our state — especially women — have roundly rejected GOP extremism, most recently by electing pro-choice Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz.
In more good news from 2023, Republican Assembly Speaker Vos backed off his threats to impeach Protasiewicz and overturn the results of that election. More than abortion rights, Vos is worried about the court’s plan to redraw Wisconsin’s worst-in-the-nation gerrymandered voting maps. But apparently even he didn’t have the chutzpah to reverse the will of the voters in an election that wasn’t even close. For whatever reason, he did not make good on his impeachment threat in time to block the court from acting.
Even if Vos were to impeach Protasiewicz, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers could appoint her replacement, presumably keeping the Court’s new liberal majority intact.
So the biggest political news of 2024 for Wisconsin will likely be a new, fairer map.
That would be a good start on saving democracy from the gathering storm. It’s our best hope in this dark season.
