[QUOTE=As long as that is permitted under the state Constitution, they are not hindering the peaceful transfer of power.[/QUOTE]
No, they’re just hindering the power.
Nothing is “free”. In your first career, your health insurance and retirement were part of your compensation package. Your union (or you if you were non-unionized) and your employer agreed to this total package which made them due to you for services rendered. You earned them. They were not free.
What Wisconsin did was strip bargaining rights away from public sector workers on the grounds that “hey, public service workers and unions are overwhelmingly Democratic. Let’s fuck them over!” and nothing more.
Never forget that they had to wait two extra weeks to fuck them over. Two whole weeks! It’s like the 9/11 of political shadiness. Never forget!
The GOP routinely violates the social contract and then points fingers at the other side.
That has nothing to do with the principles of democracy. No one likes it when they lose, but someone who believes in democracy accepts it when they lose and works towards the next election. Approving of subverting democracy means you don’t believe in democracy. Belief in democracy comes before belief in the policies of your chosen candidate.
An Exit From Trumpocracy - David Frum
That was a RIGHT thing to do, because everything Walker wanted to do was BAD. And WRONG. And EVIL.
And if anyone thinks I don’t understand Poe’s Law or I would have put some kind of smiley to indicate that I was being sarcastic, let me assure y’all that I understand Poe’s Law just fine. Those evaluations are 100% objectively accurate and consistent with observed reality.
Walker also never even hinted at these being on the slate of things he would do if elected.
The 2004 change removed the governor’s power to appoint a replacement Senator, and set up a special election for a Senator to serve the remainder of the term. So under the terms of that change, the seat would stay vacant for the 4-5 months before the special election.
But in 2009, when MA had a Democratic governor and Ted Kennedy was in failing health, they changed the law again so that the governor could appoint a replacement to serve the 4-5 months until the special election. At the time, there were exactly 60 Democratic Senators, resulting in a filibuster-proof majority. So Paul Kirk (D) was appointed to the seat until Scott Brown (R) was elected a few months later.
It will be interesting to see what happens if Elizabeth Warren does throw her hat in the ring for 2020, given that MA currently has a Republican governor.
And like most Republicans, he doesn’t care to dispute what you’ve said. He’s not interested in debating the merits of democracy and probably sees more popular forms of democracy as inherently ‘flawed,’ preferring flawed forms of democracy in which only the “qualified” voters participate.
What matters isn’t whether the will of the people is respected – after all, they aren’t “real” Americans and “real” Wisconsinites. What matters is that those who were democratically elected to power a few years ago maintain that power. This is what authoritarian regimes do - use the legitimacy of their being elected to power to justify tinkering with the system so that it’s harder for a majority of people to vote them out once they’re there.
It’s not just Trumpocracy, as the article labels it; this is a movement that’s decades in the making and Trump represents the arrival of that movement’s time.
What it will take to get out of this is an abrupt realization among 60-70% of Americans that republicans act against the interests of most Americans. They will have to wake up and realize that voting Republican means voting for oligarchy.
Even with bargaining I still have to pay a percentage of my wage into the state retirement fund. Previously I did not have to do that. Doesn’t hurt me a bit and it’s better for state taxpayers that I/we do.
Dems are considering lawsuits.
A picture of the Wisconsin gerrymander.
Quite frankly, it’s a work of art. If I’d set out to create a gerrymander that perpetuated GOP control of the legislature, I doubt I could improve much on it, even if it were my full-time job.
The GOP managed to create 30 districts that were basically 99-100% Democratic (compared with 8 districts that are that solidly GOP) which of course meant that if the state as a whole was 50-50, the GOP would get >2/3 of the vote overall in the remaining 61 legislative districts. So even in a Democratic wave year like 2018, few of those seats would be winnable by Dems.
The result, as we all know, was that Dems got 53% of the vote last month, but only 36 out of 99 seats. Impressive as hell, and also antidemocratic as hell. The trappings of democracy are still there, but the Dems would probably need about a 57% majority of the vote to eke out a bare majority of the legislature.
The GOP has managed to fashion a legislature that is extremely resistant to the will of the people. That’s not democracy.
And of course, now they are using that legislative majority that is all but immune to popular opposition, to strip the powers of the statewide offices that they can’t gerrymander.
If you believe in democracy, what’s happening in Wisconsin is an abomination.
All of us pay for each other’s benefits. When you buy a car, you’re paying for the wages and benefits of the automaker, their suppliers, the miners, the steel mill workers, on and on. When you visit the doctor, you’re paying the wages and benefits for the doctor, the staff, the janitors, etc. When you go to the grocery store, you’re paying the wages and benefits for the grocery store workers, the farmers, the shippers, etc. Yet somehow it seems that public employees (who pay their share of everyone else’s wages and benefits) are to be begrudged what they get from their employer and somehow they are not as entitled to a benefit package as any other worker. Strange logic.
There’s a reaosn I’m seeing more and more conservatives online trotting out the bizarre old “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic” thing; they do not want it to be a democracy.
If I condemned both the Democratic exit from the state and the Republican power grab, would you quarrel with the notion that I am morally superior to you?
That’s the real truth, of course.
But just to engage them, I would ask them: what do you mean, a republic? How should a republic work differently than a democracy? What are the guiding principles of how a ‘republic’ should govern itself? What’s going on in Wisconsin right now, what does that have to do with our being a ‘republic’? Should a republic have a nearly unassailable built-in bias for governance by one party rather than the other, regardless of what the people want?
“Regardless of what the people want” is the key phrase here. They know that what the people want is not what they want so they work to overcome the will of the people, and they currently feel bold enough (or threatened enough) that they’re willing to do so quite blatantly.
They give justifications for their acts but everyone knows that they’re just justifications and everyone knows that everyone knows it.
So what’s the solution? How does the majority assert it’s will when a minority has control and is gaming a flawed system in order to maintain that control?
This gerrymander is extremely resistant to the will of the people. Similar to the plot in the link posted by RTFirefly a few posts ago I looked at the district by district results found here.
We can calculate the net difference in two party vote share for each district or even all the districts together with the formula (D - R)/(D + R).
For example, statewide there were 1,308,454 D votes and 1,103,521 R votes in assembly races so the net difference on two party vote share is (1308454 - 1103521)/(1308454 + 1103521) = 0.08496… = D + 8.5.
When I did this calculation for all districts the thing that struck me was the sparseness of districts that fell in the even to D + 20 range. There are two.
What does that mean? In an election that went D + 8.5 assembly seats went 36 D to 63 R. Had the electorate flipped and this election went R + 8.5 assembly seats would have gone 34 D to 65 R. It is pretty unlikely that we’re going to see an election outside ± 8.5 point range anytime soon so the range of achievable assembly outcomes for the foreseeable future is something like 34 - 36 D versus 63 - 65 R.
The make up of the assembly barely responds at all to massive swings in the electorate that realistically achievable. Also by my analysis, which is far from perfect and limited to exactly one election, Wisconsin voters would have to go about D +21 in assembly voting to put the median seat in play. A two party vote split of 60 - 40 would probably fall just for of Democratic Party control of the assembly.
On the other hand, Democrats did once make people wait two weeks to fuck over teachers eight years ago.