Friday, March 11, 2022

A taste of this week's Vos/Gableman idiocy

A growing week of absurdity, illustrated in the Twitterverse.

And in typical GOP style, they deal with this exposure by escalating the stupidity, cover-ups and BS.

Grifting isn't easy, but Gableman and Vos sure are making it pay off at the expense of the rest of us.

But this garbage isn't really about finding the truth, it's about using the Big Lie to rig elections further for the Republicans. Milwaukee's Dan Shafer explains it well in a guest article for Belt Magazine.
A full account of the anti-democracy measures and baseless “investigations” in Wisconsin since November 3, 2020, would fill a book. But the tell all along– beyond the lack of credible factual evidence – has been that Republicans have only questioned the results of Biden’s victory, never those of the 115 state legislators or eight members of Congress elected on those very same ballots; apparently, only the tops of the ballots were illegitimate.

Republicans’ dangerous attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are a window into the unraveling of Wisconsin’s democracy. Our state legislature has an entrenched Republican majority after 2011 redistricting gave them essentially insurmountable margins. A Harvard study ranked the state’s legislative maps the nation’s worst, putting Wisconsin’s quality of elections on par with non-democracies like Jordan and Bahrain. This entrenched power is how Republicans can get away with something like the Gableman “investigation,” or have a representative as extreme as [Tim] Ramthun, or put a conspiracy theorist in charge of the elections committee. It’s how they can become the nation’s least active full-time legislature and only grant a public hearing to less than one percent of the bills introduced by Democrats. It’s how, even after Democrats and Democratic-aligned candidates won eleven of the last twelve statewide elections, the GOP still wields more power in state government.

Wisconsin Republicans have been after power consolidation at all costs. Now, even when they lose, they can’t lose. Fringe actors use this to grab a foothold in the party’s mainstream. Leaders like Vos have invited them to do so every step of the way. It’s clear that party leadership has been playing with fire, and that they have no interest in stopping the blaze.

Wisconsin is a warning. The low hum is now an alarm. Once you decide, as members of the Wisconsin GOP have, that certain votes don’t count, you’ve begun a descent into democratic peril. We have been the testing ground for Republican political experiments for years now. If the right finds success in their latest trials– this time, on the issue of foundational democratic principles – the nation is next.
ALL Republicans chose to have Vos be their Speaker, and outside of the Big Lie nutjobs, none have called for Vos to be tossed. They ALL MUST GO, because none are innocent.

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