Posted by on December 4, 2018 3:03 pm
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the Wisconsin Republican-controlled legislature wants to curb newly elected executive branch Democrats’ power:

Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin were preparing on Tuesday to vote on a raft of bills that would weaken the powers of the state governor and attorney general, weeks before newly elected Democrats take those posts.

The Republican majority called a rare post-election legislative session this week to consider the proposals. Democrats have criticized it as a last-minute power grab that undercuts the Nov. 6 elections, when Democrats broke years of total Republican control of state government in Wisconsin.

And guess who is behind the fascistic move?

On Tuesday morning, I spoke with Dan Kaufman, who has written about Wisconsin politics for The New Yorker and the Times, and who this summer published “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics,” a political history of the state. Kaufman, who lives in New York, is in Wisconsin doing interviews for a new afterword for the book that will take in the results of the 2018 midterms.

“And then this erupted,” he said. “It’s so extremely antithetical to people’s basic good government sense. They dropped the bills on Friday at 4:30 p.m. It’s ramming it through.” While public protests have already sprung up in response to the Republicans’ plan, and two Republican state senators are seen as potential, if unlikely, swing votes, the expectation in Wisconsin is that the Republicans who are pushing this plan will get it through the legislature, and that Walker will sign it. It will be one final example of Walker-style governance. “A lot of what they did, when you look at it, was about engineering their dominance,” Kaufman said.

As he pointed out in a Times Op-Ed on Monday, Democrats remain the minority party in the state legislature, and flipped only one seat in the state assembly last month, despite winning fifty-four per cent of the aggregate statewide vote. Republicans mostly had their gerrymandered districts to thank. The Party’s latest plan is the “perfect bookend” to the Walker era, Kaufman said. “It’s the most divisive thing they could possibly do,” he said. “There’s no sense of reconciliation. There’s a sense from Robin Vos, the speaker of the Assembly, of bizarre entitlement around it. He’s spinning it as if the Republicans have a mandate to govern. The Democrats won every statewide office.”

Wisconsinites are not taking this move sitting down:

In Wisconsin, protesters took to the state Capitol on Monday evening to oppose an effort by Republican state lawmakers to push through a series of bills to strip power from incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers before he takes office. Protesters flooded the Capitol building chanting “Respect our votes!” and “Shame!” The bills aim to limit the power of the Democratic governor and attorney general-elect and would restrict early voting periods. The Republicans drafted the legislation after Republican Governor Scott Walker lost a close race to Evers in November.