Norman Stockwell
Hundreds of people protested on December 3 against a slew of bills drafted in secret by Wisconsin Republicans aiming to shift power away from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
On Monday, in a replay of the scene inside the Wisconsin state capitol building just after Governor Scott Walker took office in 2011, citizens jammed the halls and chanted outside locked hearing-room doors, while Republican legislators rushed through a series of bills designed to give themselves more power and subvert the democratic process.
There were even stacks of pizza boxes in the hallway outside the hearing room from Ian’s Pizza, which coined the phrase “feeding the revolution” after serving thousands of pizzas to protesters during the uprising against Walker and Republican legislators in 2011.
In the evening, there was a spirited rally on the Capitol steps.
But this time, Walker is on his way out. Wisconsin’s divisive Republican governor lost his 2018 re-election bid, and a new, Democratic governor, Tony Evers, will be sworn in on January 7. Democrats won every statewide race in Wisconsin in November, defeating Walker and Attorney General Brad Schimel, bringing in young, progressive Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes and State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, and reelecting U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin. They also garnered a healthy majority of the total votes cast in state legislative races.
But the heavily gerrymandered state legislature remains in Republican control, and the party is pulling out the stops to keep it that way.
After losing control of Wisconsin’s executive branch, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald working in secret for weeks on bills to curtail the powers of the incoming governor and state attorney general. They released five bills on Friday December, 1, and called an extraordinary, lame-duck session on Monday to push through five bills, proposing to transfer a broad array of executive functions to the Republican-controlled legislature, under Republican control.
After a single day of public hearings before the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on Monday, they plan to bring the bills to a floor vote as early as Tuesday, December 4.
Hundreds of citizens signed up to testify on Monday, and continued to speak out against the legislative power grab into the wee hours Tuesday morning.
When Capitol police blocked a crowd of citizens surging toward the doors of the Joint Finance Committee hearing room shortly before the hearing began, people banged on the doors and chanted “Respect our vote!”
“This isn’t Russia!” one protester shouted, as a Capitol police officer pushed him back and locked the door.
“This isn’t Russia!” one protester shouted, as a Capitol police officer pushed him back and locked the door.
Republican state Senator Luther Olsen—a member of the Joint Finance Committee who is on friendly terms with incoming Governor Tony Evers and represents a possible swing vote in the Senate, where even two Republican defectors could turn back the power-grab legislation—tried, unsuccessfully, to get through the locked door before slipping down the hall to another entrance.
Inside the hearing room, Democrats reacted with outrage to the bills before them.
“The public deserves to know that this is unprecedented, what is happening here today,” said state Representative Chris Taylor, Democrat of Madison. Never before, in the history of the state, had the legislature met in a special lame-duck session to seize power from an incoming governor, she noted.
Throughout the hearing, Representative John Nygren, Republican of Marinette and co-chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, threatened to clear the room and interrupted the Democrats to scold them (especially Taylor) for “playing to the crowd,” demanding that they refrain from making comments unless they had specific questions for the experts from the Legislative Reference Bureau who were there to explain the bills.
It was standing room only in multiple overflow viewing rooms.
The bills’ authors, Speaker Vos and Majority Leader Fitzgerald, were not present to answer questions about the executive powers they were assigning to themselves. They offered no arguments in favor of their plan to transfer powers from the newly elected Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, to an unelected special counsel. They made no attempt to justify their call to hold multiple spring elections in 2020, at considerable expense and over the objections of a large majority of county elections officials. That move, which did not get out of committee (but could still come up on the floor) would protect a Republican incumbent on the state Supreme Court from having his election on the same day as a high-turnout presidential primary.
Nygren paused occasionally to insist that members of the public who clapped or booed be removed from the hearing by Capitol police.
“Did you know the Wisconsin GOP will be able to have its own private law firm(s) housed in offices in our state Capitol?” state Senator Jon Erpenbach, Democrat of Middleton, tweeted during the hearing. “All of this at taxpayer expense.”
Pondering a bill that could bring in seven law firms to advise legislators and staff, Erpenbach asked the committee, “Are they expecting a lot of legal trouble?”
He pressed members of the Legislative Reference Bureau on the issue of attorney-client privilege, receiving no conclusive answer to his questions about whether the fees charged by private attorneys, in addition to other matters of direct concern to the public, might be kept secret.
“Does anything prevent Robin Vos from giving office space in the state Capitol to private attorneys?” Erpenbach asked. The answer was no.
“You really don’t want to go down this road.”
“You really don’t want to go down this road,” Erpenbach told the committee. The 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.
Taylor followed up asking, incredulously, “So this law boots out the attorney general elected by the people of the state for an unelected, unaccountable special counsel?”
“Kind of,” an uncomfortable-looking attorney for the Legislative Reference Bureau replied.
Citizens in the hearing room erupted in cheers for Taylor, then put their hands in the air and wiggled their fingers in a sign of silent approval, so as not to be thrown out.
The committee moved quickly from one bill to the next. On the issue of holding an extra election in the spring, which would cost municipalities millions of dollars and could lead to overlapping vote counts, voter confusion, and election errors, state Representative Katrina Shankland, Democrat of Stevens Point, declared, “Not only is this a pernicious power grab, it’s going to cost the taxpayers out the wazoo.”
Localities would receive no extra money to cover the millions in extra costs incurred by holding an additional election, Shankland pointed out, calling it “an unfunded, ridiculous mandate to localities to rig a Supreme Court election.”
John Nygren replied to this attack with a little divide-and-conquer rhetoric, pitting rural voters against the voters in Madison and Milwaukee, who, he said, have more poll workers and longer voting hours. “It’s a fairness issue,” he said. The crowd in the hearing room laughed.
Tony Evers “ran and won [with] a few million votes on protecting and expanding health care,” Representative Shankland said. But now, she noted, the new governor would have to come before her colleagues on the Republican-dominated Joint Finance Committee—who were elected by a few thousand votes, in gerrymandered districts—to ask permission to do the basic work of governing. Her colleagues, she said, are positioning themselves to say “no, no, no,” and to subvert the will of the people.
One measure in the stack of bills forbids heads of agencies who are rejected by the state Senate from serving as staff or in an interim capacity, raising the specter of leaderless bureaucracies, and a state government paralyzed indefinitely as the legislature that refuses to fill posts.
Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, who flew into Wisconsin for the day to observe the hearings, pointed out the rank injustice of the Republican legislators’ maneuvers.
Wikler was hovering outside the hearing room talking about the press conference at which Robin Vos declared that taking away executive powers in Wisconsin was necessary because “the legislature is the most representative branch in government.” Wikler pointed out that Vos’s own redistricting maps ensured that, although most Wisconsinites voted for Democrats, Republicans retained control of the legislature, where “45 percent of the vote netted 63 percent of the seats.”
Vos’s own redistricting maps ensured that, although most Wisconsinites voted for Democrats, Republicans retained control of the legislature.
The nakedness of the Republicans’ power grab is hard to overstate. In Wisconsin, as in Michigan, where the legislature is executing a similar maneuver, they are seeking to negate the results of the 2018 election.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald acknowledged to reporters that holding an additional spring election in 2020 would mean that the incumbent Walker appointee on the Supreme Court, Daniel Kelly, would have “a better chance.”
Without that unfair advantage, Kelly might well lose, and Republicans could lose the majority on the Court.
There are other egregious moves in the lame-duck legislation. The Republican legislature is seizing the governor’s power to appoint the head of the scandal-plagued Wisconsin Economic Development Board (WEDC), and appointing the majority of board members of WEDC, which Tony Evers campaigned on cleaning up. Other measures include massive corporate and individual tax breaks for Wisconsinites with more than $250,000 in income, and locking in punitive work requirements for food-stamp recipients.
And, if the Republican leaders have their way, incoming Attorney General Josh Kaul will not be able to make good on his promise to remove Wisconsin from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act.
Even more troubling, the GOP lawmakers are seeking to put themselves in charge of reviewing all of the attorney general’s lawsuits and seize all settlement money, eliminate the office of state solicitor general, and bring in their own special counsel—appointed, of course, by the Republican legislature.
None of this would be possible without the egregiously gerrymandered maps the Republicans drew up in secret under Scott Walker’s administration, and which are the subject of an ongoing federal lawsuit. The maps were overturned by a federal judge. On appeal, the Supreme Court sent the issue back to lower court on procedural grounds, leaving the maps in place for 2018. But more litigation is coming.
After the 2020 census, the state will have to draw new maps. And here is where the Republicans’ power-grab may come back to bite them.
Even if the legislature succeeds in its extraordinarily cynical effort to seize power from Governor Evers and Attorney General Kaul, they can’t take away constitutional powers. The governor of Wisconsin has a powerful line-item veto, and must approve the next round of electoral maps.
And the overreach of the lame-duck session is sure to end up in court, since it raises serious separation-of-powers issues.
In the end, the Republicans are living on borrowed time.
Their last-minute, shortsighted grab for power won’t serve them well with voters in even minimally fairer voting districts.
The more they make it clear that their aim is to hang onto power by subverting democracy, the worse they look to the public.
Wisconsin is already under a federal court order to suspend limits on early voting, Representative Taylor pointed out. Additional limits on early voting the Republicans have proposed are another transparent effort at thwarting democracy.
“You want to go back and violate a court order,” Taylor said, incredulously, during the hearing. Wisconsin’s record turnout in 2018 included higher turnout in areas that allowed early voting—including Republican districts. “You’re going to be in contempt. It’s just more litigation to stop people from voting, and it’s even people in your own districts.”
Given half a chance, the people are going to vote them out.