Illustration: Getty Images
“Tween” is a new word invented to describe that awkward age when cuddly children who once loved climbing into their parents’ laps begin pulling away to become independent teenagers wanting little to do with them. Wisconsin’s tween year of 2019 is over, and next year will determine whether we all can peacefully coexist.
It’s an imperfect analogy since our most recent political past was anything but cuddly. When Scott Walker and rightwing Republicans seized control of state government in 2010, Wisconsin abruptly lost its reputation as politically progressive and became a bastion of mean-spirited extremism. The lowest point was 2016 when, having voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988, Wisconsin flipped to elect Donald Trump president.
That shock to the system finally broke the rightwing fever. Voters rebelled, and Democrats swept every statewide office a year ago. All that spared the Republican legislative majority was its own corrupt gerrymandering of voting districts, which will end after the 2020 census. Republicans made the worst of their narrow escape by continuously attempting to prevent the democratically elected governor and attorney general from doing their jobs.
The maddening political standoff all year gave short shrift to policies overwhelmingly supported by the people of Wisconsin. When Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called a special legislative session to deal with rising fears of gun violence, Republicans insulted an 80% majority supporting universal background checks by arrogantly ending the session within seconds.
Evers remains far more popular than Walker in his first year with job approval of 50% versus 38% disapproval in December’s Marquette University poll. Walker’s job approval averaged only 44% in his first year after stripping public employees of bargaining rights sparked massive public protests.
Chris Abele v. Ordinary People
The sudden, unexpected disappearance of Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, who decided not to run for reelection, will have a major impact on Milwaukee area politics. Abele went from being a wealthy contributor to Democratic campaigns to running his own to fill the final year of Walker’s term as county executive as he left to move into the governor’s mansion. Many assumed Abele had his eye on the same Madison real estate.
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Wealthy individuals who buy public careers have little patience for creating political alliances with ordinary people; they prefer simply grabbing more power for themselves. As county executives, Abele and Walker shared a disdain for being told what to do by a democratically elected, racially representative Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors.
Abele found willing accomplices among Walker’s anti-Milwaukee Republican legislators to destroy board checks and balances over the county executive. The Legislature reduced the office of county supervisor to a part-time job at half the previous pay with severely limited authority. There weren’t any major scandals under Abele’s administration—as there had been under his predecessors, Walker and Tom Ament—but he left the job even more vulnerable to corruption than he found it.
Speaking of corruption, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the state’s most corrupt branch of government, grew even worse in 2019. It’s the result of court elections usually held as low-turnout, off-year spring elections. That added Brian Hagedorn—a rightwing religious extremist publicly condemning same-sex relationships—to a Republican-financed court majority whose only guiding legal principle appears to be that anything rightwing Republicans want to do is constitutional. The court majority has adopted an explicitly unethical “code of ethics,” which allows them to refuse to recuse themselves from cases involving parties contributing millions of dollars to their election campaigns.
Retake the Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 7
The next opportunity to begin restoring ethical and ideological balance to the state supreme court’s five-to-two unethical conservative majority will be in April—a rare court election expected to draw a large voter turnout, since it coincides with Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary and municipal and county elections around the state. Marquette University law professor Ed Fallone and Dane County Circuit Judge Jill Karofsky are challenging Walker-appointed Justice Daniel Kelly, a rightwing corporate attorney, in a primary narrowing the election to two candidates on Tuesday, Feb. 18.
Next year also will mark the end of Republican F. James Sensenbrenner’s 40-year congressional career representing the most-Republican district in the state. Feel free to mutter his name under your breath while you’re waiting in line at the DMV to get your Real ID to prove you’re not a terrorist so you can get on an airplane or enter a federal building. Sensenbrenner wrote that law along with much of the original U.S.A Patriot Act, with all its undemocratic excesses of unlawful surveillance and violations of legal process passed in panic after the 9/11 attacks.
The political gridlock of Wisconsin’s tween year is about to change. Next year, armies of political organizers and enormous sums of money will be pouring into Wisconsin to boost both parties, because it’s considered a key battleground in determining the presidential election. It’s up to every decent, principled voter to prove Trumpian corruption and Republican extremism were just temporary blips in Wisconsin’s long, proud progressive history.
