Photo by Aaron McDowell
Wisconsin has seen the future of American democracy under Donald Trump and the Republican Party and it’s a nightmare.
For the record, there were 2,511 reported cases of infections and 85 deaths from COVID-19 in Wisconsin on Monday night, April 6. To comprehend the unbelievable cruelty and indifference toward human life of Republican state legislators and Republican-supported justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, check both of those numbers in two or three weeks.
That’s the incubation period for tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters to contract a deadly disease after being forced to risk their lives standing in long lines for hours on April 7 in the midst of a devastating coronavirus pandemic. It was either that or forfeit their right to vote in their state’s presidential primary, a state supreme court race and local elections.
Rising Death Toll
All those voters were under orders to stay home and avoid public contact to slow the rapidly rising American death toll now more than 22,000, the highest in the world. State Republicans, controlling both houses of the Legislature, repeatedly refused to delay the elections or increase voting by mail to protect voters’ lives.
How did Republicans get so bad they would endanger tens of thousands of state voters for some partisan political advantage? For years, they’ve depended on winning elections by dishonestly gerrymandering voting districts to prevent Democrats from winning legislative or congressional majorities even when they win the most votes and creating barriers to voting for racial minorities and other Democratic supporters in the name of fighting vote fraud when they were actually committing it. It’s only natural for Republicans to force voters to vote during a deadly pandemic when Republicans think they have a better chance of winning a Supreme Court race in a low turnout election.
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The sad truth is today’s Republican extremists don’t really support a democracy in which every citizen has a right to vote. Listen to Rick Esenberg, president of the rightwing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, who successfully urged the Wisconsin Supreme Court to overrule Democratic Gov. Tony Evers order to delay Tuesday’s elections to June 9 and ban in-person voting to protect public health.
Purging Voters
In an interview with The Atlantic, Esenberg, who has filed a lawsuit trying to purge 200,000 registered voters from Wisconsin voting rolls, explained why every American shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “I’m not one of these people who says that’s necessarily an unalloyed good. To some extent, I do believe that if people are not willing to make some effort to vote, maybe that indicates that they’re not that interested and they’re not going to inform themselves, and it’s just as well that they don’t vote.”
Everyone in Wisconsin watching the partisan Republican political corruption of their Supreme Court knew the court would side with Republicans. The court has passed a brazenly unethical “ethics code” explicitly stating justices don’t have to recuse themselves from cases involving their own campaign contributors, which includes Republican business lobbyists donating millions of dollars to their elections. It’s worse news that the Republican-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is now just as corrupt as the Republican-financed Wisconsin court.
Hours after the state court reinstated Tuesday’s pandemic elections with perilous in-person voting, the U.S. Supreme Court added insult to injury by overturning a Wisconsin federal judge’s deadline extension to accept absentee mail-in ballots because tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters had not received them by Election Day. In a totally illogical 5-4 decision, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled absentee ballots had to be postmarked by Election Day whether voters had received them or not. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in dissent the court’s order “will result in massive disenfranchisement.”
The decisions by Wisconsin’s highest court and the U.S. Supreme Court are an ominous sign for democracy and the right to vote in November. We appear to have little legal protection against whatever disgraceful political tactics Trump and Republican employ to try to remain in power.
During the most dangerous year for in-person voting in our lifetimes, both parties should simply make sure all their own voters have access to safe voting by mail. In fact, that’s exactly what the Republican National Committee is advocating in Pennsylvania as a convenient, secure and above all safe method of voting during the deadly pandemic. Republican governors and secretaries of state in Ohio, Georgia, New Hampshire and Iowa are doing the same.
But Trump can’t stop lying about mail voting even though he voted by mail in Florida, his new place of residence, in the 2018 midterms and last month’s primary. Trump recycles the falsehood that Democrats are less honest than Republicans. With Democrats, Trump said, “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room signing ballots all over the place.” Democrats apparently have much bigger living rooms than Republicans.
