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Madison Wisconsin Skyline
Just 10 years ago, Wisconsin was viewed nationally as a forward looking state alongside Massachusetts, Minnesota, Connecticut and California. People now ask why we often find ourselves listed with Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky?
How can Wisconsin Republican legislators who control both our Assembly and Senate feel they can arrogantly ignore the interests of their constituents in a democracy? Or how can the Republican leadership in both houses of our state legislature callously watch Wisconsinites die from COVID-19 as they fight against the science-based policies Governor Evers tried to institute to save lives? And why has Wisconsin become such an angry and aggressively divided state when not that long ago, we could disagree with our neighbors without despising them.
Much of this stems from the gerrymandered 2011 redistricting map drafted by unethical elected officials, who only cared about gaining and maintaining power, rather than trying to improve the health, wellbeing, and economic opportunities of the average working person.
How do the Republican’s Gerrymandered Districts Corrupt Everything?
It’s all about corrupt redistricting called Gerrymandering. Unfortunately, Wisconsin became the nation’s leader in this corrupt redistricting 10 years ago when the Republican majorities in both the State Assembly and Senate spent over $3.5 million of our tax dollars to pay lawyers to draw and later to defend legislative political boundaries. These gerrymandered district lines give Wisconsin the dubious honor of having the most corrupt and most gerrymandered legislative district lines in the entire country. Our legislative districts are so extreme and corrupt that a Federal three-judge panel (two of the three judges were Republican presidential appointees), ruled that Wisconsin’s legislative district lines were “unconstitutional,” but the Republican leadership managed to keep them from ever being redrawn. Governor Scott Walker enthusiastically signed the redistricting bill since it supported his “divide and conquer” strategy he often bragged about.
Extreme gerrymandered districts create many problems, including a polarized legislature, because elected officials only to need to worry about winning a primary. The gerrymandered maps ensure that the Republican nominee will win the general election. The centrist legislators, who often lead the compromises, were defeated or retired in the subsequent election cycles, leaving only the extreme rightwing candidates in the majority party with a safe majority.
As a result, the Republican candidates quickly learned that they only have to appeal to a few groups: extreme right-wing voters, now known as the Trump base; extreme rightwing special interest groups and their check writers; and the lunatic conspiracy crowd to prevent being challenged and taken out from the right. Satisfying those groups makes you virtually undefeatable. The survivors quickly learned to play by these rules and unfortunately some actually believe all the lies. Very simply, if they can avoid a primary from the right, they are totally assured re-election and they can ignore the needs and the desires of the rest of their constituents.
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Split Government Can Help Insure More Fair and Competitive Districts
Over a 10-year period, there can be major demographic changes in some areas and very few in others. Areas that either lost population or, more realistically, didn’t grow in population as fast as the rest of the state, could see some major changes in their legislative boundaries in order to comply with U.S. Supreme Court rulings. The most critical ruling was the “One Person One Vote” standard from the 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims. The Court ruled that legislative districts must be roughly the same size in population making every citizen’s vote equal. Another important court decision insured maximum opportunity for minorities to elect representatives from their community.
Redistricting is messy, but necessary for honest districts that give every citizen an equal impact on state policies. It can become every person for themselves, and leadership has life and death power over legislative careers. Every legislator is watching, negotiating and begging as the maps continually evolve. Some legislators are encouraged to retire so there are fewer conflicts. Incumbents don’t want to end up in an Assembly district with another member of their own party and have a primary against possibly a very good friend. This could be life or death for their political careers and not as a result of anything they did wrong.
Split government obviously prevents gerrymandering, which is why it was so important that Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker since the gerrymandered districts prevented the Democrats from ever winning control of either the Assembly or the Senate. Split government forces a compromise, resulting in more fair and competitive districts or redistricting ends up in the courts. In the past several redistrictings—until the hyper-gerrymandered redistricting of 2011—the courts ended up drawing the maps. Neither side was totally happy, which is how it should end up.
What Lengths will Speaker Vos Take to Stay in Power?
Much like his apparent role model, Donald Trump, the current Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos, is preoccupied with power and control and helping his personal interests, not about legislation to improve average people’s lives. People who know Vos say that he will do almost anything to try to stay in power. Since he knows that in almost all recent legislative elections, more votes are cast statewide for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, he might try almost anything whether it’s constitutional or not. As Assembly Speaker, he has unlimited taxpayer dollars to spend on lawyers.
So, one unconstitutional tactic that the speaker might try is to redistrict the legislature without passing a bill which requires the governor’s signature. The Republicans tried to redistrict the state legislature without the governor’s signature in the 1960s and the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled against their efforts. Right now, our seven-member state supreme court has four conservatives, three of whom put politics over the law. Those three actually wanted to consider Trump’s ludicrous lawsuits, invalidating some of the votes cast in the 2020 elections, which other judges throughout the country ridiculed. The court’s fourth conservative, Justice Brian Hagedorn, has shown some indications that he will stand up to political pressure and follow the law, including Wisconsin Supreme Court precedent.
Going Forward
Obviously, you don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to know that it was not the intent of the drafters of the Wisconsin constitution to allow the legislature to redistrict itself without the governor’s signature. If that were the case, all one party needed to do was have a majority in both houses during a redistricting year like the Democrats had in the 1991; they could have ignored the Republican governor at the time, gerrymandered the districts and stayed in power forever. Every 10 years they would still be in control of the legislature thanks to their gerrymandered districts and would just do another gerrymander and again stay in power ad infinitum.
So, it is important to be vigilant if we don’t want to end up with gerrymandered districts again in this redistricting process. We need to pay attention to what is happening. We need to speak up, organize and demand fair district lines so the American democratic process of compromise can work. It was working somewhat well in Wisconsin until the 2011 redistricting caused Wisconsin to be labeled the most gerrymandered state in the country. We can do better.
Louis Fortis is publisher of the Shepherd Express and a former state legislator and economics professor.
