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Wisconsin State Capitol
It’s no surprise Republican legislators want to perpetuate for 10 more years the corruptly gerrymandered legislative and congressional Wisconsin voting districts they created a decade ago, but it’s absurd.
The governor and the legislature are required by law to draw new voting districts every 10 years to reflect population changes after every census. And population’s not all that’s changed dramatically in state and national politics over the past decade.
The racist tea party election of 2010, an anti-government white backlash to the 2008 election of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president, elected extreme rightwing Republicans in Wisconsin and many other states. Wisconsin’s reputation as politically progressive was transformed overnight with the election of Scott Walker as governor and Ron Johnson as U.S. Senator.
Ten years later, raucous tea party rallies waving racist slogans and caricatures of Obama as an African witch doctor have grown into lawless mob violence against American democracy itself. An unethical TV celebrity seized the dark undercurrent of racial hatred in the Republican Party to win election as the first openly white supremacist president in modern history.
Mob Violence
Donald Trump’s single term began with mob violence by notorious Klansmen and neo-Nazi supporters in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. It ended with another violent mob attack Jan. 6 on the U.S. Capitol bludgeoning police senseless and threatening to murder members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president. After those deadly riots, Trump praised supporters who participated as “very fine people” and “very special.”
The largest voter turnout in history defeated Trump after four years, but Republicans continue passing voter suppression laws and gerrymandering elections to disenfranchise voters in 2021 just as they did in 2011.
Gerrymandering requires “packing and cracking”—packing Democrats into the fewest possible voting districts while scattering others into so many different districts they will always remain a powerless minority. Sophisticated computer algorithms can draw voting maps producing lopsided majorities for Republicans even when more votes are cast for Democrats.
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In 2011, Walker and Republicans had total control of redistricting to shamelessly destroy representative democracy in Wisconsin. Three federal appeals court judges ruled Republicans unconstitutionally violated voting rights by gerrymandering boundaries to assure Republicans would retain a majority of 54 seats in the 99-seat Assembly even if they won only 48% of the vote.
How Losers ‘Win’ Elections
That actually underestimated the Republican corruption. The disputed maps were used in 2012 while Republicans appealed and ultimately prevailed. As predicted, Republicans won only 48% of the vote but it resulted in Republicans winning 60 Assembly seats. Despite winning more Assembly votes, Democrats won only 39 seats.
Even during the disastrous 2018 midterms for Republicans when Democrats won every statewide election led by Gov. Tony Evers’s defeat of Walker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election, the Democratic sweep did nothing to reduce what had grown into a 63-seat Republican Assembly majority. Demographic experts estimate Democrats would have to defeat Republicans by 10 or 12 percentage points statewide to have any chance of winning an Assembly majority. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.
Wisconsin Republicans are trying to pretend they’re not the minority party that lost the last two statewide elections. It’s long past time to replace a dishonest voting map created 10 years ago that never truthfully reflected the choices of Wisconsin voters for the legislature or Congress. The only thing worse than 10 years of corrupt Republican gerrymandering would be 20 years of corrupt Republican gerrymandering until 2031.
Fortunately, Walker’s now gone. Evers can veto corrupt Republican gerrymandering that renders the choices of Democratic voters meaningless. Evers already has vetoed a barrage of new voting restrictions by Republicans desperate to join their party’s national free-for-all assault to destroy voting rights and American democracy. “I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” Evers told the New York Times.
Corruption is Legal?
Unfortunately, what happens next in a standoff between Evers and the legislature isn’t clear. Trump’s perversion of the Supreme Court was obvious in 2019 when Chief Justice John Roberts eagerly joined by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ruled federal courts should play no role in outlawing corrupt gerrymandering. “The fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ does not mean the solution lies with the federal judiciary,” Roberts wrote.
Get that? Corrupt gerrymandering violates the principles of democracy, but federal courts shouldn’t do anything about it. State Republicans are already trying to block federal lawsuits on redistricting and refer political disputes to the partisan Wisconsin Supreme Court, which almost always backs the Republican legislature against Evers. Even if cases remain in the federal courts, Trump and Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate rushed confirmation of nearly 250 federal judges, many woefully unqualified.
The dangerous new Trumpian majority on the Supreme Court is growing more ominous every day. After watching Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party, no one in America should ever take democracy’s survival for granted.
