Photo credit: dalekooyenga.com
State Representative Dale Kooyenga is hoping to get to the Wisconsin State Senate in this fall’s election. Others question whether Kooyenga should be on his way to our state senate or our state penal system. Kooyenga committed what most people would definitely call theft when he took something that was not his and took it to his office. I think most of us would tell children that that is stealing. After the owner complained, Madison’s Capitol Police discovered through a surveillance video that Kooyenga had stolen the property and later found it in his office. Rep. Kooyenga then surrendered the stolen property to the police.
More specifically, Donald Johnson applied for and was granted a state permit to lawfully display a protest sign in our state capitol building, which is a relatively common practice. The sign was critical of President Donald Trump and the Republicans for supporting Trump. Unfortunately, Kooyenga seems to have some issues with our basic First Amendment right of freedom of speech, so if he doesn’t like what a sign says, he can just take it. Kooyenga decided that he didn’t like this particular sign, so, constitution be damned, he stole the sign—which had the state permit affixed to its back—and hid it in his office. Johnson sued Kooyenga, and Kooyenga eventually settled for $30,000, which he then foisted on us taxpayers to pay.
The Big Lie
Now for the really interesting part: An adult—especially a person in such a powerful position as a state lawmaker and who is seeking an even more powerful position, a seat in the state senate—should have immediately accepted responsibility for his action and apologized. Instead, Kooyenga, who is a big law-and-order guy when it comes to other people and demands violators accept responsibility for their actions, appears to view things differently when he is the perpetrator.
His reaction was to accept no responsibility and offer a series of lies. The best one of his lies—one that even conservative fellow Republican columnist Christian Schneider thought was totally unbelievable—defended his theft by saying that it was because of his past military training. Kooyenga claimed that, in the military, he learned that a sign against a curved wall was a clear risk. Really? Actually, the sign was on an easel, making it nearly impossible to hide something behind it.
We want to make it very clear: We very much respect Kooyenga’s military service, especially when we are in a time of conflict as we have been for the past 17 years. However, other veterans feel that Kooyenga shouldn’t use his military service as his excuse for stealing. They point out that his argument is absolutely silly, and real military training does not train a person to take the law into their own hands, especially when it is not a crisis situation.
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U.S. military training believes in chain of command, demands that their people in uniform take responsibility for their actions and teaches active service members to promptly report violations to the proper authorities. (In this case, there actually was no violation of any law.) Also, veterans have pointed out that Kooyenga served in the military to defend the U.S. Constitution—including the First Amendment’s freedom of speech, even if he doesn’t like the speech. Protecting unpopular speech is what the First Amendment is all about; we don’t need its freedom of speech to protect speech about puppies and kittens.
Trying to Stick it to the Taxpayers
After being sued, Kooyenga agreed to settle the case for $30,000, which was really zero dollars to him, since he had his Republican friends in state government push this $30,000 settlement costs onto us taxpayers. Unfortunately for Kooyenga, his little scam of pushing the costs of his illegal behavior onto the taxpayers got exposed in the media. The reaction from the voters was so strong, with many seriously questioning his character and hurting his campaign, he finally agreed to have his friends and family pay the $30,000.
The real problem is that Kooyenga’s behavior is the result of the Republicans having virtually unchecked power in state government. Kooyenga’s 14th Assembly District has been made into a very safe Republican seat through what a federal three-judge panel has declared an unconstitutionally gerrymandered redistricting process that enabled the GOP to comfortably control both chambers of the legislature despite getting more than 200,000 fewer votes than the Democrats in a post-redistricting election.
Total control of the legislature—along with control of the governor’s office—has allowed the Republicans to pass a host of very controversial and often self-serving legislation that led many Republican legislators to actually believe that they are above the law. As long as a state legislator like Kooyenga can ignore the laws and try to push their $30,000 settlements onto the taxpayers, things will only get worse.
