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Red Wisconsin button
After nine months and spending at least $676,000 taxpayer dollars, Michael Gableman, the rightwing conspiracy theorist hired by Republicans to try to discredit President Biden’s election victory in Wisconsin, just dumped an enormous load of garbage on the state legislature.
Photo via wicourts.gov
Michael Gableman
In this case, “garbage” is an appropriate technical term. “Garbage in, garbage out” is the phrase invented in computing to describe the unreliable nonsense you get when you input false data into a computer program.
Gableman gave Republican legislators exactly what they wanted. He recommended the Republican majority overturn Biden’s victory by throwing out all 3.3 million votes cast in the presidential election that awarded the state’s 10 electoral votes to Biden.
Supreme Court Said No!
More than a year ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled such an action was unconstitutional in a decision written by Justice Brian Hagedorn, former legal counsel to rightwing Gov. Scott Walker joined by three more liberal justices, in response to an election lawsuit brought by supporters of the loser, Donald Trump.
Ironically, Gableman served a single 10-year term on the state Supreme Court departing a year before Hagedorn joined. Gableman was one of the most unethical justices in the court’s history, notoriously rewriting the court’s “ethics code” allowing justices to refuse to recuse themselves from cases involving companies whose lobbyists had funneled millions of dollars in campaign contributions to elect those justices to the court.
Gableman’s seemingly endless investigation — this was only an “interim report”—has become a major embarrassment for Republicans who hired him. Wisconsin’s the last state with Republicans still fighting over Trump’s defeat instead of moving on to this year’s midterms.
Dead on Arrival
Republican Assembly majority leader Jim Steineke, who’s not seeking re-election in those midterms, has already declared Gableman’s unconstitutional scheme dead on arrival.
“In a world where partisan divides are deep and seemingly anything can be justified as long as it results in retaining power, handing authority to partisan politicians to determine if election fraud exists would be the end of our republic as we know it,” Steineke tweeted.
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But here’s the serious problem Republican leaders have created for themselves. The longer Republicans desperately try to please Trump’s most angry, hateful and outright loony supporters, the more they will continue to be controlled by them.
Thoughtful Republicans like Steineke, who refuses to be part of any effort “to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections,” will continue to flee from elected office, leaving behind a far more dangerous party contemptuous of respecting voting rights and democracy.
Gableman Hates the Elderly
One of the cruelest moments in Gableman’s presentation of his unconstitutional recommendations to legislators was when he played videos of elderly nursing home residents being grilled about their political views on candidates and public policy. Gableman claimed it proved “mentally incompetent” people had been allowed to vote in Wisconsin.
It was a replication of the racist Jim Crow testing of Black voters by Southern registrars requiring them to interpret archaic language of the Constitution or try to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. Ann Jacobs, Democratic chairwoman of the Wisconsin Election Commission, tweeted the brutal interrogations were “completely irrelevant to whether people have a right to vote. You’re allowed to vote for a candidate for any reason you choose.”
Republicans certainly don’t want intelligence tests to be required for voting. Trump increased the party’s support among white voters with less education and increased support for Democrats among the well-educated.
License to Gerrymander
Gableman also wants to abolish the bipartisan Wisconsin Election Commission even though Republican legislators created it in 2015 with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Trumped-up Republicans no longer support bipartisan equality. Gableman wants Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican legislative majority to have total control over whether to accept election results if they go against Republicans.
It’s surprising Gableman’s crack team of election investigators didn’t notice that on the day Wisconsin’s electors met to officially cast their 10 electoral votes for Biden after he won the election, 10 prominent Republicans were sneaking around the closed-down state Capitol up to no good.
The Republicans were part of a plot to steal the election for Trump in seven swing states Biden won. They met privately to sign fraudulent documents that were sent to the National Archives and U.S. Senate falsely claiming to be “duly elected and qualified” electors casting those states’ electoral votes for Trump.
The plot failed because Vice President Mike Pence refused on Jan. 6 to violate the Constitution under pressure from Trump to throw out electoral votes in states where Republicans were falsely claiming “conflicting” slates of electors. That would have left Trump with enough electoral votes to win the election.
You might think a statewide investigation into election fraud spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars would look into that sort of thing. But Gableman’s assignment was never really to prevent election fraud. It was to justify Republicans committing it.
