David Michael Miller
You have to give Republicans credit for sharing best practices.
Within 24 hours of Tony Evers’ victory over Gov. Scott Walker, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos was already talking about taking away some of the new governor’s authority before Evers took office.
This is just what happened in late 2016 in North Carolina. Roy Cooper, a moderate Democrat, had just defeated Republican incumbent Pat McCrory, but the Legislature remained in Republican hands. So, in a lame duck session while McCrory was still in office, Republican lawmakers conspired to limit the new governor’s authority. That’s right. McCrory signed legislation cutting back the powers of his own office, powers he had enjoyed himself. In other words, McCrory showed no respect for the office, democracy, fairness or just common decency. He and the Republican Legislature acted as if they were running a two-bit banana republic.
Vos apparently thinks that’s really neat because he wants to do the same thing in Wisconsin before Walker leaves office in January. If he follows the North Carolina game plan he’ll propose taking away some of the governor’s power to appoint positions in state agencies and on important boards and commissions.
Vos is leading the charge on this, but he was quickly joined by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. Evers and legislative Democrats have blasted this, but before Evers takes office in January they are powerless to do anything but try to rally public opposition. Walker has not yet said if he would sign bills limiting his office’s authority.
Vos does not care about the damage he and his party at the state and national level are doing to American democracy. There used to be guardrails — the idea that just because you have the power to do something doesn’t mean that you should do it. Practicing statecraft was about living within a set of principles and employing some self-restraint. Some of that was about commonly accepted ideas about fair play that a person should have learned back on the school playground, but much of it was about long-term thinking: If I do this to them, they might do it to me when they get the upper hand.
So, Vos is not helping when I argue to my fellow Democrats that the most important thing we can do now that we have some power back is to rebuild the guardrails. I’ve had this conversation more than once and with people who have long histories in government high up in Democratic administrations. They’re fed up with how Republicans have pressed every advantage while they’ve been in power. They want to give them a strong dose of their own medicine. They want to bring a machete to the knife fight.
Call me naïve but I hate that idea. What’s most important to me are those norms of American democracy, not any particular policy or the blood lust of repaying the other guys in kind. So, I’m encouraged by statesmen like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) when he talks about restoring comity to the House Intelligence Committee that he will soon chair, rather than running it as a Democratic version of the partisan weapon that it had become under Republican Devin Nunes.
If Democrats employ the quaint old rules of treating those out of power with some modicum of respect, will that mean that the cycle will be restored and that Republicans will do the same when they come back again? I’d say the odds are against it and yet it should be done.
Look, Republicans are destroying the norms of our democracy because they fundamentally hate government in the first place. The Democrats are the party of government. We respect the system. The values of fairness and the rights of the minority are supposed to be in our DNA. And that should apply even when that minority becomes Republicans and Trumpians as it surely will someday.
I don’t want to live in a two-bit banana republic — even one that is run for a time by people I agree with — because that means that no progress will ever be stable, and even when in power, we’ll all have to look over our shoulders and build walls to keep out the hordes.
As Democrats start to move back into positions of power let’s not adopt the worst practices of the other guys. Instead, let’s reassert the values of American liberal democracy: majority rule with minority rights, the rule of law, respect for freedom of speech and a free press, and a sense of fair play. The best way to repudiate guys like Robin Vos is to not become like him.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at isthmus.com.
