Al Franken and John Doe and Trump-Russia.

On this melancholy day, the great Charlie Pierce delivered with a column summing up the loss of a Senator from our neighbors to the West.

I was going to let Dahlia Lithwick’s angry, lucid account in Slate of the end of Al Franken’s senatorial career speak for me, since Lithwick said everything I felt about this tawdry episode, and probably better than I could. Especially this part:

Is this the principled solution? By every metric I can think of, it’s correct. But it’s also wrong. It’s wrong because we no longer inhabit a closed ethical system, in which morality and norm preservation are their own rewards. We live in a broken and corroded system in which unilateral disarmament is going to destroy the very things we want to preserve

.…

Lithwick is dead right. There is no commonly accepted Moral High Ground left to occupy anymore, and to pretend one exists is to live in a masturbatory fantasyland. It’s like lining yourself up behind Miss Manners in a political debate against Machiavelli. Until the Democrats are willing to think asymmetrically about the very real political danger posed by the president* and his party, the danger will grow until it becomes uncontrollable, and that point is coming very soon, I fear. By the time the Democrats admit to themselves that their political opposition has moved so far beyond shame that it can’t even see Richard Nixon any more, the damage wrought to our political institutions may be beyond repair.

Oh, and just a reminder, out there touring a book right now are veteran conservative ratfckers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. Lewandowski grabbed a female reporter on the campaign trail and Bossie once invaded a hospital room and berated the mother of a young woman who’d committed suicide. You look across a political landscape like the one that the last few decades have created, and the Moral High Ground looks like the lichen-mottled ruins of a dead civilization.

While I reluctantly think that Franken had to go because Dems (and our society in general) needs to have a zero-tolerance policy for scummy behavior by men towards women, I totally get Pierce’s and Lithwick’s points. Voters recently haven’t given a lot of benefit to “going high” these days, so why do good when the other side wants to destroy you?

However, I think this case is an exception, as I think being on the side of women vs lecherous men in power is something that connects with casual and/or low-info voters as these sexual harassment scandals explode, and that’s why I think it was tactically correct to have Franken resign. It also takes down the “both sides” BS that GOPs will inevitably try to pull, and lays bare that the GOP accepts such scumminess.

But Dems have to follow up and hammer GOPs for the next 11 months for being scum, instead of standing by and thinking that the casual person will remember in November 2018 that the Dems did the right thing in December 2017. The Dems in Wisconsin made the mistake of “assuming better angels” during the John Doe case in the 2010s, which reappeared in the news yesterday due to the release of an 88-page report from Attorney General Brad Schimel’s office. In John Doe, “trusting the system” failed miserably, and Wisconsin is still paying a big price for what was allowed to go on.

Schimel’s report dealt with the leak that led to details of Scott Walker’s and the Wisconsin GOP’s money-laundering operation being printed in The Guardian last year.


You think we've forgotten about this?

Most of the Department of "Justice"'s report is typical partisan Schimel hackery and is filled with the GOP’s “whiny victim” act. But there is an interesting and borderline funny part of the document that centers on comments from GAB employee Shane Falk.

When discussing the motion to quash filed by the attorneys for the targets, Falk stated, “These arguments are all baloney. The attorneys just don’t know what their clients did. They likely don’t have the full facts.” Falk claimed that the attorneys for the targets ignored applicable case law and a GAB formal opinion. He claimed that the attorneys for the targets violated ethics rules by not being candid with the court and by not identifying contrary authority. He claimed that the attorneys did not understand the trouble their clients were in. He criticized Attorney Rick Esenberg who at that time taught election law at Marquette University Law School (and now collects wingnut welfare full-time through the Bradley Foundation's chop shop at WILL), stating “Esenberg doesn’t know what he is talking about . . . . We are very familiar with Esenberg too and we should not be concerned about his understanding of campaign finance laws.”

After reviewing a motion from the attorney for the Friends of Scott Walker, Falk commented “Wow. He really doesn’t understand campaign finance law.” Falk ironically stated, “There is the reality of the law and what they (attorneys for the targets) think the law should be. They conflate the two and misrepresent the reality.”

But that’s the intelligence of the crooked GOP’s design- distort reality and facts, use your GOPperganda machine to lie on AM radio and Right Wisconsin regarding what the case is really about (tellingly, emails to Mark Belling, Icki McKenna and Charlie Sykes are part of the evidence collected), and then try to get some paid-off right-wing judges to make up a ruling that makes your laundering and concealment of donors to be “legal, free speech.”

I also note one closing part of Schimel's report, which is intended to paint Falk in a bad light, but instead reveals just how debased our state has become in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.

In November 2013, Shane Falk wrote to the special prosecutor:

Please keep up the great work and stay strong. Remember, in brief, this was a bastardization of politics and our state is being run by corporations and billionaires. This isn’t democracy to say the least, but due to how they do this dark money, the populace never gets to know. The cynic in me says the sheeple would still follow the propaganda even if they knew, but at least it would all be out there so that the influences on our politicians is clearly known.

Boy are those words prophetic!

By the way, why did it take an “illegal” leak for us to know about this money-laundering and donor-hiding scheme, anyway? And why did the Wisconsin Supreme Court order evidence to be destroyed, and why haven’t we seen everything that was investigated to find out if some of the people ruling on the John Doe case were actually involved in the shenanigans themselves?

Which is why I think it's a big error that WisGOP and hate radio keep talking about how the bought-off GOP hacks at the Wisconsin Supreme Court came up with BS that kept paid-off GOP hacks at the Capitol from doing perp walks for their laundering scheme. Given that what is happening with another money-laundering and influence-peddling operation in DC, where the GOP is trying the same "we're being persecuted" BS to slant public opinion on another investigation, people might want to cast their eyes back to how the GOPs spun, lied and rigged things in Wisconsin. Especially since an overwhelming majority of Americans want to see Robert Mueller’s investigation continue without White House interference, WisGOP's act looks really bad today.

And Dems should not back off when GOPs claim they are “playing politics” when they call out GOPs for being such scum. As we have seen in Wisconsin, GOPs are the ones suppressing the vote, bending and breaking the law, and abusing their power. So when GOPs are (rightfully) investigated or blocked for their wrongdoing, they say the critics/investigators are being “partisan” because they’re going after GOPs. We need to remind people that the reason GOPs got investigated in John Doe and the reason that Robert Mueller is looking into Trump-Russia is BECAUSE THE GOPS ARE THE ONES LAUNDERING MONEY AND ABUSING THE LAW.

Just because the Wisconsin Supreme (Kangaroo) Court said such laundering was legal and that people didn’t have a right to find out who were pulling the GOP-puppets’ strings, it still doesn’t make it OK.

We need to directly ask voters “Do you think money-laundering is OK?” “Do you think that covering up corruption is OK?” “Do you think that it’s “debatable” that Roy Moore preyed on 14-year-old girls?” And the DPW and our state’s citizens need to step up, speak out against these crooks, and do their part in excising that cancer, and stop waiting for the casual day-to-dayer to figure it out.

Al Franken may have done the honorable thing by stepping aside today, but there’s no honor in allowing the evil of an amoral and lawless GOP to continue to degrade our society. At every turn, these crooks have tried to rig the playing field to the favor of themselves and their big-money puppetmasters, and erode our faith in government and our common decency (which is absolutely a goal of theirs).

The WisGOP/Walker/Trumpian mentality of “we are above the law and will bend any rule to win” needs to be taken out for good, and all right-wingers that were part of these scams and those who covered it up must be removed in 2018. In Wisconsin, that includes the wingnut judge trying to get on the Supreme Court this Spring, to Walker and the WisGOP majority in the Legislature, to the GOP CongressMEN trying to cover up Trump’s crookedness in DC.

While the WisGOPs likely won’t get the prison stripes they deserve for their sliminess, removal via the ballot box would at least be a start in wiping away the stain that this John Doe money-laundering scheme has placed on Wisconsin.