Photo via mccarthyforcongress.com
Kevin McCarthy
Kevin McCarthy
There’s a very good reason why corrupt political gerrymandering has driven Republicans impeachment-crazy in the Wisconsin legislature and on the looniest far-right reaches of Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans.
Obviously, Wisconsin Republicans want to impeach state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz to prevent her double-digit election victory over a rightwing opponent from forming a new progressive majority on the court ending 15 years of unethical rightwing court control.
That extreme court approved two decades of corruptly gerrymandered voting maps resulting in lopsided two-thirds majorities for Republicans in the legislature and Congress even though the state is nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
The most extreme House crazies who have now pushed McCarthy into launching an impeachment investigation into Biden also depend on gerrymandering by their own state legislatures. Their districts are filled with enough extremists to keep them in office dead or alive into the next century. That’s why they can say any nutty thing they want to attract public attention.
GOP Worries
That’s why the Republican party is in so much trouble right now. The majority of American voters are not nutty, rightwing extremists who support Donald Trump’s violent attempt to overthrow American democracy. They threw Trump out of office by the largest vote in history.
Trump’s four criminal trials on 91 felony counts brought by federal and state prosecutors aren’t going to convince anyone to change their minds about Trump. First-time young voters care about abortion rights, climate change, their LGBTQ friends and banning assault weapons. By threatening to impeach Protasiewicz and Biden, Republicans are alienating everyone who turned out to elect them by wide margins.
For all the clamoring by Republicans ever since the 2020 election about how corrupt Biden and the Democrats are, they still haven’t identified a single impeachable offense Biden or Protasiewicz have committed. Protasiewicz hasn’t even heard a case yet. McCarthy simply announced House Republicans were investigating Biden’s impeachment and said they’d let us know why later.
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After electing the only president in American history who was ever impeached twice by the House of Representatives for committing crimes in the Oval Office, you would think Republicans would understand how impeachments are supposed to work under our Constitution.
The first step is an elected official has to commit a crime. That’s the part Wisconsin Republican legislators and House members keep leaving out in their eagerness to impeach Protasiewicz and Biden just because they got elected.
The previous House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t have any trouble identifying the major crimes that led to Trump’s two impeachments because Trump committed his crimes in plain sight.
The first impeachment was for Trump’s call to Volodymyr Zelensky threatening to withhold U.S military assistance protecting Ukraine from Russia’s invasion unless Zelensky launched a phony investigation falsely accusing Biden of corruption in Ukraine before the 2020 election. Zelensky refused to lie for Trump.
Violence Against Democracy
The second was for Trump’s attempt to violently overthrow democracy by sending a rioting mob of his supporters to attack Congress to try to prevent it from certifying Biden’s election. That one was broadcast live for all the world to see.
No American voters who watched that attack on Capitol police who received permanent injuries and brain damage from the rampaging mob that sent members of the House and Senate in both parties fleeing for their lives along with Vice President Mike Pence and his family can ever forget it no matter how many lies Trump and other Republican presidential candidates tell about how peaceful it was.
That day has created record voter turnouts in major state and national elections ever since to repair the damage to democracy from Trump’s presidency and the unethical rightwing supermajority he left behind on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a brazenly partisan 5-to-4 decision that gave us a sneak preview of how much Republican-appointed court justices cared about protecting our constitutional rights. That was the decision ordering federal courts to stop interfering in corrupt gerrymandering by state legislatures in Wisconsin and other states even if it dishonestly distorted the results of elections.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the scathing dissent for the minority justices: “For the first time in this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation” that destroyed the fundamental voting rights of millions of Americans to elect their own representatives in “free and fair elections.”
Corrupt political gerrymandering makes voting meaningless by electing politicians who don’t reflect the views of state voters. That’s existed in Wisconsin for a decade and a half. It’s the reason why state voters turned out in huge numbers to elect a court that would protect the reproductive rights of women and end political gerrymandering.
They’ll do the same thing again in 2024 and in every election after that until their votes are counted in our democracy.
