In an earlier post in this series, I discussed how in the mid-20th century, the nation of South Africa transformed from a country people thought of as a democracy (at least for whites) into a dictatorial, fascist junta supported by only a small fraction of the population. What happened in South Africa was not supposed to be a model for 21st-century America, but in the wake of November's elections several states dominated by Republicans are doing everything they can think of to continue to spite the will of the people.
One of my favorite observations on these recent developments comes from Jason Sattler in USA Today, "Republicans have given up on voters. America's future depends on whether Democrats can expand voting rights faster than the GOP can restrict them."
This is the thread that ties together everything I've discussed in this series on the many threats to America's democratic institutions. White, conservative Americans now see that in their lifetimes people of color will become a majority in this country, and they also see that the new multicultural majority is rejecting the neo-liberal politics of Ronald Reagan that seek to perpetually grow power for the wealthy while brutalizing the poor. And the old conservative white hegemony does not intend to let a little thing like democracy curtail their power.
Back to Jason Sattler for an overview of what Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan since Democrats were elected as the next Governors of those two states:
"The GOP’s smash-and-grab "lame duck" agenda in the Badger and Wolverine states has unfolded rapidly and is blatantly aimed at keeping the right’s rejected policies in place long after Democrats are sworn in. This sort of disdain for the will of voters is possible in large part due the scourge of partisan gerrymandering that's likely illegal.
These unfair electoral maps gave the GOP huge majorities in the Wisconsin and Michigan legislatures when the party barely carried the states in 2016. Last month those maps helped them keep control of both state legislatures, even as Democrats won statewide offices from governor on down."
The changes in the law just signed by defeated incumbent Governor Scott Walker weaken incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers' ability to put in place rules that enact laws and shield the state jobs agency from his control. They also weaken the attorney general's office (voters elected a Democrat to that office too) and handcuff the ability of the incoming administration to implement the Affordable Care Act. The icing on the cake: Republicans also decided to limit early voting, of course. And Republicans in the state legislature have little to fear from the voters in term of possible backlash to their power grab; gerrymandering of state House districts locks most of them in for as long as they care to stay in office. In last month's election, Republicans held 63 of 99 seats despite Democratic candidates receiving 190,000 more votes statewide.
And say, what justifications have Wisconsin Republican suggested for these power grabs? Well, Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Assembly said that in the past, "we made mistakes where we granted too much power to the executive." Yes, he's suddenly realized the Governor has too much power just as a Republican is about to be replaced by a Democrat. But it's all justified as, "We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in."
Meanwhile, (back to Jason Sattler again):
"Republicans in Michigan, where I live, are also trying to deny Democrats elected to statewide constitutional offices the powers that their GOP predecessors took for granted. For instance, they’re trying to take away the secretary of state’s ability to enforce campaign finance laws after (Democrat) Jocelyn Benson was elected secretary of state on a platform of — you guessed it! — better oversight of campaign finance.
But that’s not nearly the most rotten thing going on in Michigan.
Faced with ballot initiatives that would have raised the minimum wage and established earned sick leave for all the state’s workers, Republicans instead passed both proposals last summer as a way to keep them off the ballot and make them easier to change. Now, surprise, they have amended those laws to deny the sick leave to 1 million workers, and slow the rise of the lowest acceptable wage to $12 by 2030 instead of 2022 and, for tipped workers, to $4.58 by 2030 instead of $12 by 2024."
Paul Krugman of the New York Times has also recently discussed how Wisconsin has become, "a state that may hold elections, but where elections don’t matter, because the ruling party retains control no matter what voters do." And he offers the significant observation that, "As far as I can tell, not a single prominent Republican in Washington has condemned the power grab in Wisconsin, the similar grab in Michigan, or even what looks like outright electoral fraud in North Carolina. Elected Republicans don’t just increasingly share the values of white nationalist parties like (Hungary's) Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice; they also share those parties’ contempt for democracy. The G.O.P. is an authoritarian party in waiting."
Krugman mentioned North Carolina. Yes, once again we turn to the state where Republicans seem most determined to destroy any semblance of democratic process. A new election is expected in the district in which Republican Mark Harris is credibly accused of hiring operatives who altered and illegally handled ballots.
But last month's election produced some good news regarding the continuing efforts of the Republican legislature to cement control of North Carolina despite the election of a Democratic governor last year. From Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo: "A Democrat beat the GOP incumbent for the state Supreme Court, after a failed Republican attempt to rig the election in favor of the incumbent judge. The GOP ballot initiatives that sought to usurp executive power from the Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper were defeated. Whether the GOP will maintain control of both legislative chambers is still too close to call. But it appears that the Republican super-majority— which has allowed the legislature to override Cooper’s vetoes — has been broken."
Finally a suggestion from Paul Krugman on how Democrats can take advantage of public disapproval of the sore-loser power grabs:
"If Democrats can offer a unifying indictment tying Republican attacks on democratic norms to Trump administration abuses, along with a coherent package of serious proposals to restore procedural fairness, voters will have a way of making sense of new examples of Republican sharp dealing. Proposals to shorten lame duck legislative sessions and to constrain their authority, for example, would reinforce the idea that Republicans have been the party of procedural abuses and unfairness while still setting forth a good neutral rule.
This is the alternative to doing nothing or making things worse: seek to punish Republicans in 2020 by offering a vision of how to make things better."
Showing posts with label Scott Walker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scott Walker. Show all posts
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Friday, November 23, 2018
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Twelve: Wisconsin and Organized Labor (Good Riddance Scott Walker!)
There was no victory sweeter in this month's midterm election than the defeat of Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker by Democrat Tony Evers. If you're unfamiliar with why Walker was possibly the Republican leader most reviled by Democrats after Donald Trump, here's a summary from Scott Bauer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
While Scott Walker's revolution signed into law many things that Republicans wanted, those changes have not brought the prosperity that conservatives promised (surprise, surprise). I recommend this article from David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute for a comparison between Scott Walker's failed policies in Wisconsin contrasted with the more liberal path chosen by Minnesota. Cooper notes:
"Since the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Governor Mark Dayton in Minnesota, lawmakers in these two neighboring states have enacted vastly different policy agendas. Governor Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature have pursued a highly conservative agenda centered on cutting taxes, shrinking government, and weakening unions. In contrast, Minnesota under Governor Dayton has enacted a slate of progressive priorities: raising the minimum wage, strengthening safety net programs and labor standards, and boosting public investments in infrastructure and education, financed through higher taxes (largely on the wealthy)."
Cooper goes onto note that between 2010 and 2018 job growth and overall economic growth has been markedly stronger in Minnesota than in Wisconsin. Minnesota also saw faster wage growth, greater shrinkage in gender wage gaps, greater increase in median household income and greater reduction in poverty. Minnesotans are also more likely to have health insurance.
There's a lot more to be said about the mess that Scott Walker made in Wisconsin, but I want to focus on the way his agenda has increased corporate and conservative power at the expense of working people and the democratic process. Here's what I said about Walker five years ago in a post called, Cheat to Win: The Republican Strategy to Stay in Power:
---
Old joke: A corporate executive, a union representative and a worker are sitting at a table with a chocolate cake on it. The executive cuts the cake into 8 slices and takes 7 for himself. He then turns to the worker and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he'll try to steal your share of the cake."
In January of 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. This of course has been a giant gift to Republicans, who as a result of the ruling have seen a veritable tidal wave of money pour into their coffers from corporations and billionaires. In 2010, the first election after the Citizens United Decision, the top four fundraising groups, all of whom were created to give money to Republicans, contributed $97.7 million. In distant fifth place was the Service Employees International Union, which raised $15.7 million for Democrats. Similar to the old joke above, Republicans look at this situation and think, "We've got to stop these union contributions to elections."
Here's an example. In 2011, new Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker went to a great deal of trouble to destroy the union representing state employees. Walker claimed that busting the union would save the state money, but was ultimately forced to admit that it did not. So what's the scheme? Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did everyone the courtesy of explaining the real goals of the plan in plain language, "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."
---
Like so many right-to-work states, Wisconsin has increased corporate power at the expense of everyone else. This strategy is ultimately self-defeating; a consumer economy can't function when working people don't have money to spend. But the damage Scott Walker has done is far deeper than that. Walker has taken a page from George Orwell's 1984: It isn't enough to be louder than the opposition; the point is to eliminate the voices of resistance entirely. Today's Republican party has achieved new heights in endlessly lying about, well, everything. According to the Washington Post, President Trump lies an average of 7.6 times per day, on every subject from the economy to immigration to the Mueller investigation.
We may know in our minds that Trump is lying, but the more Republicans dominate the media and eliminate organized labor and other voices on the left, the more it becomes impossible to refute Trump's lies. Or as the character Winston Smith observed in the novel 1984,
"The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’."
Wisconsin is also, again thanks to Scott Walker, on the cutting edge of voter suppression. In my next post I'll be covering some of the latest developments in the Republican scheme to keeping voters from exercising their franchise.
"Walker blew into office as part of a red
wave in the 2010 election, with Republicans capturing control of the
state Legislature at the same time. Together they enacted a host of
conservative reforms, chiefly taking away nearly all collective
bargaining power from teachers and other public workers as part of a
fight in 2011 that put Wisconsin at the forefront of a new war over
union rights.
That battle that drew
protests as large as 100,000 people spurred the 2012 recall, which
Walker won. It raised his national profile and laid the groundwork for
his presidential bid. Along the way, Walker signed laws making Wisconsin
a right-to-work state, enacting a 20-week abortion ban, passing a
concealed-carry law and scaling back a host of environmental regulations
that businesses opposed."
While Scott Walker's revolution signed into law many things that Republicans wanted, those changes have not brought the prosperity that conservatives promised (surprise, surprise). I recommend this article from David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute for a comparison between Scott Walker's failed policies in Wisconsin contrasted with the more liberal path chosen by Minnesota. Cooper notes:
"Since the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Governor Mark Dayton in Minnesota, lawmakers in these two neighboring states have enacted vastly different policy agendas. Governor Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature have pursued a highly conservative agenda centered on cutting taxes, shrinking government, and weakening unions. In contrast, Minnesota under Governor Dayton has enacted a slate of progressive priorities: raising the minimum wage, strengthening safety net programs and labor standards, and boosting public investments in infrastructure and education, financed through higher taxes (largely on the wealthy)."
Cooper goes onto note that between 2010 and 2018 job growth and overall economic growth has been markedly stronger in Minnesota than in Wisconsin. Minnesota also saw faster wage growth, greater shrinkage in gender wage gaps, greater increase in median household income and greater reduction in poverty. Minnesotans are also more likely to have health insurance.
There's a lot more to be said about the mess that Scott Walker made in Wisconsin, but I want to focus on the way his agenda has increased corporate and conservative power at the expense of working people and the democratic process. Here's what I said about Walker five years ago in a post called, Cheat to Win: The Republican Strategy to Stay in Power:
---
Old joke: A corporate executive, a union representative and a worker are sitting at a table with a chocolate cake on it. The executive cuts the cake into 8 slices and takes 7 for himself. He then turns to the worker and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he'll try to steal your share of the cake."
In January of 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. This of course has been a giant gift to Republicans, who as a result of the ruling have seen a veritable tidal wave of money pour into their coffers from corporations and billionaires. In 2010, the first election after the Citizens United Decision, the top four fundraising groups, all of whom were created to give money to Republicans, contributed $97.7 million. In distant fifth place was the Service Employees International Union, which raised $15.7 million for Democrats. Similar to the old joke above, Republicans look at this situation and think, "We've got to stop these union contributions to elections."
Here's an example. In 2011, new Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker went to a great deal of trouble to destroy the union representing state employees. Walker claimed that busting the union would save the state money, but was ultimately forced to admit that it did not. So what's the scheme? Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did everyone the courtesy of explaining the real goals of the plan in plain language, "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."
---
Like so many right-to-work states, Wisconsin has increased corporate power at the expense of everyone else. This strategy is ultimately self-defeating; a consumer economy can't function when working people don't have money to spend. But the damage Scott Walker has done is far deeper than that. Walker has taken a page from George Orwell's 1984: It isn't enough to be louder than the opposition; the point is to eliminate the voices of resistance entirely. Today's Republican party has achieved new heights in endlessly lying about, well, everything. According to the Washington Post, President Trump lies an average of 7.6 times per day, on every subject from the economy to immigration to the Mueller investigation.
We may know in our minds that Trump is lying, but the more Republicans dominate the media and eliminate organized labor and other voices on the left, the more it becomes impossible to refute Trump's lies. Or as the character Winston Smith observed in the novel 1984,
"The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’."
Wisconsin is also, again thanks to Scott Walker, on the cutting edge of voter suppression. In my next post I'll be covering some of the latest developments in the Republican scheme to keeping voters from exercising their franchise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)