David Michael Miller
Wisconsin Republicans had to go all the way to Wausau to find a judge to overturn Dane County Circuit Court Judge Richard Niess, who blocked the Republican Legislature’s lame-duck power grab. Good for Gov. Tony Evers for seizing the moment between Niess’ stay and the appeal overturning it to withdraw our state from the federal lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, as he promised to do before he was elected (and before the Legislature and Scott Walker made their 11th-hour move to take away Evers’s powers).
Whatever happens in the dueling lawsuits over the power grab, one thing is clear: there is no justification for it, other than Republican sour grapes and lust for power.
On March 26, a second Dane Circuit Court Judge, Frank Remington, ruled against the Republicans on some of the lame-duck measures, in a case brought by a coalition of unions. Remington, whose ruling still stands, supported the administration’s right to withdraw from the ACA lawsuit, writing, “The Legislature has the power to change the responsibilities assigned to the Attorney General, but it may not castrate his/her ability to act as the lawyer for the State of Wisconsin nor can it constitutionally usurp the power of the executive branch.”
Republicans argue that undoing their power grab and restoring power to the newly elected governor and attorney general will cause “chaos” and undermine hundreds of laws passed in emergency session over the decades.
But the Wisconsin Legislature had never before held an extraordinary session to disempower an incoming governor and attorney general.
Just by bringing up the lame duck session and keeping it in the news, the lawsuits shine a light on the indefensible, undemocratic legislative majority.
My favorite social-media response was a hastily-drawn Venn diagram showing “laws Walker passed” and “laws struck down” with an overlapping area labeled “same laws.”
Remember Walker’s ridiculous Venn diagram press conference, in which he displayed a chart showing circles labeled “Walker Administration” and “Evers Administration” and an overlapping area that said “same powers”? Not only was it an embarrassingly inaccurate use of a Venn diagram, immediately afterward, Walker sat down to sign the bills taking away Evers’ powers. How dumb do the Republicans think we are?
Now they’re at it again. They are doubling down on the part of the lame-duck power grab that promises to be the most costly to taxpayers: giving themselves the right to hire private attorneys at taxpayer expense.
On March 22, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “a legislative committee signed off on giving leaders additional authority to hire attorneys to ensure they can continue to get involved in litigation despite Niess’s ruling.”
Instead of doing the people’s business, Republican legislators want to use the people’s money to pursue their own ends.
As state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, Democrat of Middleton, warned during the hearings when the Republicans were ramming through their power-grab bills, “You really don’t want to go down this road.” A bill on private attorneys, which would allow each committee to keep its own counsel on retainer, would “more than quadruple the number of attorneys walking around this building doing secret business, protected by attorney-client privilege. It’s going to be a million dollars before you even know,” he said.
The whole raft of bills the Legislature passed and Walker signed, from grabbing power to hiring their own private attorneys was, as Tony Evers put it, “a hot mess.”
And things have gotten messier.
A federal judge struck down the early-voting restrictions that passed as part of the lame-duck laws, saying they were clearly similar to the restrictions he had blocked two years ago.
Explaining the need for the transfer of power from the incoming governor to himself and his allies in the state Legislature, Republican Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald told WISN right-wing radio host Jay Weber, “We trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back and forth with the Legislature. We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas.”
Apparently, the people of Wisconsin couldn’t be trusted either, since they elected Evers— so our gerrymandered Legislature had to take matters into its own hands.
The Supreme Court is taking up gerrymandering cases that could affect Wisconsin this week.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “Gerrymanders have become ever more extreme and durable, insulating officeholders against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides.”
That’s how, in Wisconsin, Republicans ended up controlling 63 percent of the seats in the state Assembly after winning only 45 percent of the vote.
In his state budget, Evers has proposed that, like Iowa, Wisconsin should have a nonpartisan body draw the state’s political map. Under Evers’s plan the Legislative Reference Bureau would draw new districts after the 2020 census. The map would have to pass the Legislature, which, if it voted down the map twice, could make its own amendments — but they would have to pass both houses by a 75 percent majority, making it hard for Republicans to gerrymander the anti-gerrymandering process.
I can’t wait to hear their objections to that.
Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive magazine.
