You know, I’ve been trying to avoid writing about politics much here because sweet dancing monkeys on a stick but it’s bad enough just thinking about the morass of soulless iniquity that the modern GOP has become – from its poster child in the Oval Office to the moral vacuum that is Congress to the state GOPlets that are working hard to destroy any vestige of remaining law, order, or Constitutionality in the United States – without having to double my blood pressure medications and talk myself out of any number of short-term responses that would do nobody any good, least of all me, if I tried to write about it with any frequency.
And then the Wisconsin GOP pulls another one out of its collective ass. Just when you think they have hit rock bottom, they begin to dig.
For those of you not following along, Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) was tossed out on his lawless ear in November, along with pretty much every Republican on the statewide ballot. It was a rout.
Not that this actually means anything for Wisconsin, since the Wisconsin GOP spent most the last decade burrowing like termites into the joists of the republic, instituting one of the most extreme partisan gerrymandering efforts in all of the US (and destroying the evidence when a federal court demanded to see how they arrived at these districts – why Governor Teabagger [a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries] and the rest of his cabal are not currently in jail is an interesting exercise in what happens when one party takes over every part of the government and decides not to bother with enforcing laws). Despite winning only 46% of the statewide vote in legislative offices, the Wisconsin GOP ended up with 63% of the seats in the state legislature.
Because minority rule and ignoring the will of the American people are what the GOP is all about these days, after all.
Sit down, citizen. Who do you think you are to assume you have a say in your overlords?
This is why, perhaps, I should not be surprised at the fact that this minority legislature has decided that they certainly cannot allow the democratically elected state officials who will replace the previous Republican junta to exercise actual power.
So this week they are planning a panicked emergency session of the legislature to ram through a bill that pretty much nobody – including the putative sponsors – has read all the way through, one whose highlights include stripping immense amounts of power away from duly elected officials and giving it to (wait for it … wait for it … wait for it …) the Republican-controlled minority legislature!
Isn’t that special?
Citizen, I thought I told you to sit down.
They’re also going to sharply reduce early voting, since people who vote early don’t generally vote for Republicans.
And they're going to rearrange the primary elections in 2020 so that there will now be three – one per month – in order to try to give partisan advantage to the latest right-wing extremist they’d like to force onto the national joke of a state supreme court that they’ve built since 2011. This despite a near-unanimous protest by the county clerks who would need to run this operation, who have pointed out that it is expensive, unnecessary, and logistically next to impossible. That does not matter to the Wisconsin GOP, because when push comes to shove they care only about their iron grip on power.
They don’t care about laws.
They don’t care about morals.
They don’t care about voters.
They don’t care about anything but the perpetuation of their own illegitimate rule.
Regardless of consequences.
Because there will be consequences. You can’t undo an entire election and expect people to regard you as a legitimate government. You can’t force minority rule down the throats of an electorate and expect people to obey your edicts.
And they will have no one to blame but themselves.
There are words for this.
ReplyDeleteThey are not, however, a good fit for this platform. Or any civilized space, for that matter.
Time to slingshot the Enterprise around the sun again.
Spock, you have the con ...
Lucy
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
ReplyDelete-Charles A. Beard