Last week Governor Evers tried for a second time to promulgate a Wisconsin policy driven by the consensus of all the leading epidemiologists in the world by implementing a statewide face mask requirement. The scientists agree that this small inconvenience can literally save the lives of your friends, family, community members and yourself. All the recent polling shows that most Americans and Wisconsinites agree that a mask mandate, albeit an inconvenience, is sound public policy, and they are willing to wear masks since they know it could save lives.
As soon as the Governor promulgated the rule, the Republican leaders in the state legislature began to attack the governor and the policy and again started doing whatever they could to undermine it. They even threatened to again sue the governor. In the early stages of the pandemic in the U.S., Evers, like many other governors, put together a plan that included sheltering in place. The Republican legislative leadership sued, and the always compliant rightwing majority in our State Supreme Court supported their Republican legislative friends and prematurely opened the Wisconsin economy. Now Wisconsin has rising cases of COVID-19 and an increasing death rate. Wisconsin has become such a “hot spot” that the City of Chicago is currently not allowing Wisconsin residents to visit.
So Why?
The question any reasonable person would ask is, “why would the Republican leaders in the Wisconsin State Legislature want to undermine this policy knowing that if they are successful in killing the mask mandate, more people will contract COVID-19 and more people will die?” Very conservative, very pro-Trump governors like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida who initially disparaged the idea of mask wearing are now promoting it, and they themselves are wearing masks. Even President Trump is now promoting the wearing of masks and on occasion wearing a mask himself, but not Wisconsin Republican State Legislators.
Unless you have been asleep for the past few months, you know the consensus of the scientists throughout the world, is that wearing a mask will help to minimize the spread of COVID-19, and it will save lives. So why? Is it because the Republican state legislators just don’t want the government to tell them what to do? Is it because they think the “liberal” governor has no right to make such a policy even though the governor of Mississippi, perhaps the most conservative state in the union, along with many other conservative Republican governors have promulgated a mask wearing policy? Are they simply pandering to the Trump base even though the leaders of the Trump base, including Mr. Trump himself, are now promoting mask wearing? Is it that they are only listening to the small group of extreme rightwing millionaire and billionaire campaign check writers whose tunes they dance to? Or is it that they see it all as a game of how they can screw over Evers and prevent him from lowering the rate of new cases of COVID-19 in hopes of making him a one term governor? One can only assume that they believe, if people die, they’re just collateral damage. If they succeed again in undermining the governor’s effort, how many more Wisconsinites are needlessly going to get sick and how many are going to die?
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One Possible Answer
One simple answer to the question of why is that these are not normal Republicans. This is an extremist crowd. Thirty years, we had split government with the sides flipped. We had a Republican Governor, Tommy Thompson, and the legislature controlled by Democrats. I was in the state legislature at that time, and we worked fairly well with the governor despite disagreeing with him on many issues. However, when something was so clear cut and important for the health and safety of our fellow citizens, we put politics aside and worked together. For example, we passed a secondary enforcement seat belt law in 1987, which some residents viewed as an infringement of their rights, but it had bipartisan support and Governor Thompson signed it.
If we could pass something like a seat belt law that only protected the passengers in the car with split government, why can’t they support a mandatory mask law that not only protects the wearer but everyone around her or him. What is so different now?
A Former Republican State Legislator Speaks Out
I contacted a former Republican colleague who served in the state assembly with me a few decades ago, and he said, “these are not regular Republicans like we served with in the 1990’s. Unfortunately, these are just extreme people. They are small thinkers. They should be looking out for what’s good for the state not what a group of aggressive rightwing extremist want.”
“Like their lame duck legislation after the 2018 election,” he continued, “the Dems could have done something like that in 1986 when the Dems controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office and then Tommy Thompson won the governorship in November 1986. The Dems had two months to make any lame duck changes they wanted. I don’t think it was ever even discussed. It was too extreme and nasty and bad for Wisconsin.”
The current Wisconsin Republican legislators are calling this Mask mandate an over-reach. Governors, both Democrats and Republicans from conservative and liberal states, are implementing mask wearing. They are the chief executives of their state, and they have various emergency powers. Evers as the governor is elected by the entire state and is responsible for the State’s health and safety. Few things in the world are more of an emergency than a pandemic. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is elected by 1/99 of the state and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald by 1/33th of the state in extreme gerrymandered districts. (A three judge federal panel with the two of the judges being Republican presidential appointees declared Wisconsin’s legislative districts unconstitutional.) If the legislature won’t act in a pandemic, then the chief executive of the state must act.
Out of Touch with the Voters
We are being governed by an extreme minority that is out of touch with the Wisconsin voters according to voting and survey results. On issues like medical marijuana where in November 2018, Wisconsin voters in 16 counties, rural and urban counties, red and blue counties, all voted about 80% in favor of legalizing medical marijuana, but the Republicans in the legislature wouldn’t even take up the bills. The same is true for the Medicaid expansion where even conservative states like Indiana and Louisiana took advantage of, the Wisconsin Republican legislators wouldn’t accept the expanded Medicaid money. Each year they literally throwing away hundreds of millions of Federal dollars and depriving our fellow citizens of decent health care and the permanent jobs that the additional hundreds of millions of dollars would have created. Mandatory mask legislative also has strong support in Wisconsin.
This is a Democracy: Vote Them Out of Office
This is a democracy so why not just vote them out of office. The “unconstitutionally Gerrymandered legislative districts” make it almost impossible for Republicans to lose the majorities. Even in elections where the Democrats got a couple of hundred thousand more total votes in legislative elections across the state, the Republicans won about 60% of the seats. We have a state legislature that is elected by a significant minority of the votes in districts that are so skewed that extremist legislators can get elected and re-elected. Until we get honest legislative districts, we will continue to see legislation that favors the rightwing check writers and ignores the wishes of the majority and legislators that pander to extremism and often stupidity.
For example, I talked to one of my very conservative neighbors who was telling me that “the day after the election, the virus will be gone. It’s just a hoax to defeat Trump.” Does this person really believe that the scientists around the world, the national leaders around the world including Putin in Russia, are faking this whole pandemic and are intentionally destroying their economies to cooperate in a big charade to defeat Trump? It is voters like this that our extremist Republican legislators seem to be listening to and unfortunately in some cases agreeing with.
