No apologies needed. The point was important and well worth repeating.
Like, just to make things clear, I could almost understand if it was something like abortion. If the governor had the ability to make abortion legal or illegal, the power grab would make some sense - abortion has always been a big deal for republicans, and throwing democratic norms under the bus to prevent what you see as an ongoing multidecadal holocaust (assuming for the moment that republicans are being honest about how they see abortion) would make some sense. Bad for democracy, but sometimes the ends justify the means, at least in certain people’s eyes. Similarly, I could see myself throwing democratic norms under the bus for the sake of upholding basic human rights. It wouldn’t be good for democracy, but it is at least conceivable that the ends could justify the means.
But… this ain’t that. Here’s one thing the bill passed does:
- Give the legislature more power over the boards of certain commissions, like the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), the state’s jobs-focused agency, which has come under a lot of scrutiny for giving the Taiwanese company Foxconn Technology Group $3 billion in tax breaks in exchange for their $10 billion factory — an investment that even the state’s Legislative Bureau said the state wouldn’t bring returns until after 2043. Evers said he wanted to get rid of WEDC altogether, as it has garnered a reputation for falling short of its jobs promise.
This is not some life-or-death struggle by any stretch of the imagination. The republicans are saying “to hell with democratic norms” to preserve their control over a government institution designed to help pick winners and losers. They are pulling an antidemocratic power grab in defense of crony capitalism. And it’s not like the WEDC is some shining example of a well-run agency; it’s a huge mess, despite Walker and the republican party having complete control over it.
Here’s another item on the agenda:
- Limit Evers’s abilities to change the state’s work requirement laws around food stamps and health care, giving the legislature oversight over any federal waivers the state has received. Walker pushed for Medicaid work requirement waivers and waivers to drug test food stamp recipients.
Oh yeah, that looks like an important human rights issue. Make sure that they can’t make it easier to get on your state’s welfare programs - this was totally worth an antidemocratic power grab. 
What this tells us is that the republicans in Wisconsin either don’t understand that this is an assault on democracy or their attachment to democratic norms is virtually nonexistent.
This is the direction the republican party is and has been going for quite some time. Since at least 2010, with REDMAP, winning and power has been more important than the will of the people. This is just the natural next step. This path leads to a very, very dark place.
Then they should have the guts to admit it. And they should specify just what their cause is that is so important that it demands that democracy itself be overridden in its service.
Then we wouldn’t be in a democracy anymore, would we now?
I don’t know if that was your intent, but you’re implicitly comparing (a) the current situation, where change by democratic means is an option, but one party is forgoing that avenue because they don’t have sufficient popular support to win democratically, and (b) a hypothetical theocracy in which change by democratic means doesn’t exist as an option.
I don’t see how one’s response to (b) informs what the appropriate response to (a) might be.
They went one step further; they didn’t just strip the governor of power, they stripped the attorney general, too, ostensibly to make it harder for Democrats to battle with Republicans in the courts. What Republicans seem to be doing is changing the rules of the game so that Wisconsin is more like a parliamentary form of government and not a legislative/executive government.
Democrats and progressives need to take their little kiddie 3-D sunglasses off and understand how Republicans see the world. They see the world in terms of power. They are not democratically-minded, which is why they don’t give a God damn about whether they win or lose something fairly - people need to understand that.
As long as Republicans have any power at all, they will abuse it until they are forced out of power. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are no - good - republicans - because the “good” ones enable the bad, and even that is something we cannot afford as a country.
If you see an R, you vote against it. No questions asked.
Your condescension is duly noted.
It makes sense if you believe in every single conspiracy theory the Republicans spread about the Democrats and, therefore, honestly believe that they’re a Satanic pedophile cult who are going to enslave us all the moment they get the chance.
If you believed that, and you saw around you that they could still win elections and that nobody else seemed to agree with you on what is, in your mind, a pretty big fact about reality, you’d conclude that any democracy which allowed the Satanic Pedophilic Baby-Eating Party to gain power wasn’t serving the actual human beings in the population. Actual human beings are, pretty much by definition, against pedophilia, hein?
From there it’s a pretty short jump to supporting dictatorships or kings, seeing as how democracies have this bad habit of allowing literal pedophiles to gain office.
It’s a scary mirror world, created and cultivated quite deliberately by people inside and outside this country.
This thread reminds me of a
[quote]
(https://twitter.com/windsormann/status/1019797277358125056?lang=en) by David Frum:
Food for thought, I’d say.
C’mon pkbites, you know this is more than “just politics”. This isn’t remotely comparable to skipping out on a vote. People voted for a specific governor and the governorship had specific powers when they voted. Stripping some of those powers between the election and assumption of office is blatantly undermining democracy. The people voted for a person to be able to do specific things and they are changing the nature of the office before he gets to do them. How can you not see how wrong that is?
Imagine your city had an elected Auditor and a tough as nails guy got elected. Before he is seated the city council strips the office of all oversight capacity. Would you say that is “just politics”?
In support of this, I reiterate:
It isn’t the peaceful transfer of power if you don’t actually transfer power. Gutting the powers of an office and peacefully transferring its empty shell doesn’t count.
This is partisan payback for the attempted recall of Walker in 2011-2012; it might also partly be business as usual for Republicans now. But I’m more confident saying the recall effort motivated this. Historically the tool of recalling governors has hardly ever been employed or worked. Many people just haven’t learned their lesson and think this it made sense to attempt to have the people represented that way, regardless of what it could mean down the line should that tool be used against them by the new standard it first was.
Republicans are worse and have far less moral high ground because of the gerrymandering and also shenanigans like Walker being forced earlier this year by the courts to hold a couple of special elections for vacated seats. Again though, some people need to be taught a lesson. They’d be getting off on it twisting the meaning of words if it was their side doing it.
I think the problem with the recall was that too many people didn’t know the difference between a recall and an impeachment. You impeach an officeholder because he’s done something actually illegal. You recall him (in places that have recalls) because you just don’t think he’s the best person for the job.
That isn’t what happened. What happened is, like in a lot of other threads, people didn’t actually read any of the other posts and just posted their own thoughts. It happens a lot on these boards.
If I see an R I don’t necessarily vote for it. Anyone know who the RINO was that voted against this? I haven’t seen it published yet. Though I just woke up due to shift work.
From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
You better organize a primary against Cowles! How dare he think for himself? How dare he think that democratic transfer of power could possibly be more important than keeping Democrats from actually running things?
Another post in agreement with this statement. I was trying to think if a lame-duck session of this magnitude has happened before. I’m sure it has, but I cannot remember anything like this happening. And a Google search doesn’t yield any specific examples.
If this is ‘just politics’, it would be happening on a regular basis. It does not.
I can’t remember where atm but the Rs did something almost exactly the same within the last couple of years, stripping a governor of powers before inauguration.
pkbites, I am not some radical Liberal, let alone a Democrat. This is crazy. You can’t defend this.
It was Norh Carolina in almost exactly the same situation.
Keep wearing the sunglasses, kiddo.
No, how dare he not represent the district he is from. They elected him to a Republican agenda, not Tony Evers agenda.
And least you forget, I am the one who said this was a huge political risk. Public opinion could turn savage against the GOP. We’ll find out in 2 and 4 years from now. But with a Republican majority on both sides Evers was going to fail anyway. So this really isn’t that big of deal.
People have short memories. That’s one of the thing on which they cynically count.
What are you gonna do about it? Sit there and snivel?
Republicans own you. They’ve taken your country from you. They’ve taken everything that matters to you from you. What are you gonna do about it?
Probably nothing except talk about how we should find ways to understand them.:rolleyes: