Is Wisconsin Going Sane?
Is Wisconsin Going Sane?
The state’s new redistricting agreement is encouraging, as are a few random acts of courage.
I DON’T WANT TO JINX IT BY pointing it out, but lately there have been some welcome indications that my dear state of Wisconsin may be stepping back from the abyss. Chief among them is that the GOP-dominated state legislature has approved, and the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, has signed into law, new voter boundaries that will greatly increase the number of competitive legislative districts. It may even give Democrats a fair shot at winning one or both houses, so long as they manage to get more total votes than Republicans. What a concept.
Wisconsin’s previous maps, often said to be the most gerrymandered in the nation, were designed to deliver huge majorities to Republicans even in elections where Democrats won statewide races—something they’ve done in fourteen of the last seventeen such contests. Thanks to these maps, GOP lawmakers now enjoy a 64–35 lead in the state assembly and a 22–10 supermajority in the state senate. This has allowed Republicans to ride roughshod over the legislative process, including by rejecting wholesale Evers’s appointments to key positions and withholding funds to force the University of Wisconsin to curtail its efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In January, the state’s Republicans passed maps that were similar to those proposed by Evers, with just a few tweaks to reduce the number of lawmakers who would have to run against each other. Evers vetoed these tweaks, saying they amounted to partisan gerrymandering. And so the GOP lawmakers agreed to accept Evers’s maps as submitted—maps that will force more than forty incumbent lawmakers, mostly Republicans, to either move or run against each other. GOP lawmakers will be paired against each other in fifteen districts, compared to just two pairings of incumbent Democrats (and then, one of the Democratic incumbents is actually retiring); four districts will have Republican as well as Democratic incumbents.
This has drawn howls of protest from Republicans including state Sen. Duey Stroebel, who was shifted into a district he describes as “a stone’s throw” from the one he has represented in the upper chamber since 2015. He’s now in the same district as another incumbent Republican. “That was done by design,” he charges. “That happened all over the state.”
And yet Stroebel voted in favor of Evers’s maps, as did almost every other Republican legislator. The vast majority of holdouts were Democratic lawmakers, some of whom felt Republican support for the legislation might be some kind of a trick. All indications are that it isn’t.
Why did GOP lawmakers go along? They feared that the state supreme court’s new liberal majority would choose maps that were even less friendly to their side. “It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned, or led to the guillotine,” explained Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard. “We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.” He was speaking figuratively.
The choice faced by Evers in this matter was remarkably similar to that of Republicans in Congress on the issue of immigration: Both balked until they got everything they asked for. The difference is that Evers took the deal.
“It’s a new day in Wisconsin,” Evers said after signing the bill. He pledged to work with the next session’s new assortment of lawmakers to have future maps be drawn by a nonpartisan entity. A separate legal challenge could yet change the voter boundaries for the state’s congressional districts, in which Republicans now hold six seats to the Democrats’ two.
And all of this is happening because Democrats in Wisconsin succeeded in winning one of the elections they could.
LAST APRIL, AFTER the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly elected liberal Janet Protasiewicz to the state’s supreme court following a campaign that was largely about redistricting and reproductive rights. Protasiewicz said on the campaign trail that she thought the state’s maps were “unfair” and “rigged,” which they clearly are. Her opponent, Dan Kelly, and his Republican backers went berserk, saying this amounted to Protasiewicz prejudging the issue, even though she never said how she would rule on any given case. It even led to baseless calls for her impeachment, in a controversy that dragged on for months.
On August 2, the day after Protasiewicz was sworn in, voting-rights groups filed a lawsuit seeking to have the maps in place since 2011 declared unconstitutional. In December, the court did just that, ordering new maps to be drawn up in time for the 2024 legislative elections. The court said that if the governor and the legislature could not agree on new maps, then it would step in and do so. Prepare to run screaming from the room.
Prospective new maps were submitted by six parties. Consultants hired by the court rejected the proposals from legislative Republicans and a conservative law firm, calling them “so biased in partisan terms that they can clearly be labeled partisan gerrymanders.”
That left four Democratic-leaning maps, including those from Evers, Democratic state senators, and the liberal law firm Law Forward. Any of these, according to the consultants, would “improve on traditional good government criteria.” A detailed analysis by a research fellow at Marquette’s law school found that while Evers’s maps slightly favor Republicans, they would still likely hand legislative majorities to whichever party got the most statewide votes.
Wisconsin’s legislative Republicans went with Evers’s maps because they were, declared Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, “the most Republican-leaning maps out of all the Democrat-gerrymandered maps being considered by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.” He predicted that Republicans would still retain control because they have “better policy ideas.” That’s the spirit.
In a reminder of how crazy things have gotten, Vos is now facing a recall election over criticism that he did not go far enough in trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 Wisconsin win. Vos falsely claimed there was widespread fraud, met privately with election deniers equipped with lunatic theories, and spent millions of tax dollars on an election-fraud witch hunt that found no fraud. But he didn’t decertify the election, which he has no power to do, or impeach the state’s top elections official, who has done nothing to deserve it.
On Friday, it came to light that the Wisconsin Ethics Commission is recommending felony charges against members of Trump’s fundraising committee and others for their roles in a scheme to illegally funnel campaign donations to Vos’s 2022 primary election rival. Donors seeking to avoid individual contribution caps were directed to contribute to county GOP parties, adding the district number to the memo line to signal where they wanted their money to go. Among those implicated is election-denying, conspiracy-theorizing state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who allegedly facilitated illegal contributions from Trump’s joint fundraising committee to the county parties.
Looks like Brandtjen has finally found the election fraud she’s been looking for.
THE DEAL THAT EVERS REACHED with Republicans accepts redistricting as inevitable. It ends the state supreme court’s role in the current map-drawing process, and with it the prospect of continual litigation over whatever map the court might pick or create. It settles things for a while, in a state that has seen such an abundance of discord.
Of course, there’s discord still. On the day after Governor Evers signed the maps into law, senate Republicans bounced four more of his appointees from various boards, including Todd Ambs for a volunteer position on the state’s Natural Resources Board. Ambs, formerly deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, had been grilled by GOP lawmakers for his online criticism of former President Donald Trump and the Republican party. He said he made “no apologies” for speaking out against Trump. Now he has no appointment.
Such ruthlessness on the part of GOP lawmakers has become reflexive, predicated on their assumption of electoral invincibility. But now that assumption has been shattered, and the party is going to have to accept, sooner or later, that its preference for skulduggery over governing may entail political consequences.
Another reason to hope that the darkness will pass is the refusal of one of Wisconsin’s Republican congressmen, Mike Gallagher, to go along with the sham impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Gallagher, who subsequently announced that he would not seek re-election, even stood up to badgering from his GOP colleagues on the House floor.
My friend John Nichols took Gallagher to task for not voting to impeach Trump three years ago when he had the chance, writing in the Capital Times: “That was the critical test, the test of his willingness to defend democracy, and Gallagher failed it.” Yeah, I see his point. But there’s no denying that Gallagher and the two other House Republicans (Ken Buck of Colorado and Tom McClintock of California) who twice voted against Mayorkas’s impeachment showed more courage than the 214 Republicans who voted for it.
Gallagher, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, warned that impeaching Mayorkas “would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment” and “set a dangerous new precedent that would be used against future Republican administrations.” After the first failed vote, his fellow Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden posted a video saying he was “shocked and disgusted” that some Republicans didn’t go along.
Van Orden, as I’ve noted, knows a thing or two about being shocking and disgusting. Last summer, in what appeared to be a drunken tirade, he berated some teenage Senate pages he happened upon in the Capitol late at night, calling them “you little shits” and telling them to “get the fuck out of here.” He also unloaded on a 17-year-old girl working at a public library when he encountered a display of gay-friendly books, “full on shouting” and “aggressively shoving the books around.”
This is the kind of representative that Wisconsin elects to Congress these days. Maybe that will change if the courts put an end to gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts. Evers has just asked the state supreme court to look into that, too. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has filed a lawsuit that seeks to push the court to decide whether women in Wisconsin have a right to abortion under the state constitution.
FINALLY, I PRESENT FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION the recent appearance on 60 Minutes by Andrew Hitt, the former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party. Hitt was among the ten fake electors from Wisconsin, along with dozens more in six other states, who met on December 14, 2020, to sign documents falsely asserting that Trump had won in their respective states.
Hitt told Anderson Cooper that he had acted out of fear, worried that if a court later overturned the election result (as the state’s then conservative supreme court nearly did), “it would have been solely my fault that Trump wouldn’t have won Wisconsin.” He found this terrifying: “Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?”
I dunno. This sounds to me like the kind of excuse you come up with if given more than three years to think about it. Hitt and the state’s nine other fake electors knew better, or should have. A settlement reached in December required them to admit to being “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results,” commit to assisting the U.S. Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of the scheme, and accept other conditions in exchange for being dropped from a civil action being brought by Law Forward. In Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada, fake electors have been charged with crimes.
But the fact remains that Hitt didn’t have to publicly rue his role in this scheme. His decision to tell Cooper and the nation that the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen” and that Donald Trump is not suited to be president counts as commendable. His public comments further implicate the two lawyers in the fake electors scheme, Kenneth Chesbro and Jim Troupis, who are still subject to the civil suit.
And so hooray for this tiny act of courage and for the possibility, however remote, that it will beget similar courage in others. Maybe, in the not-too-distant future, this will make a difference. Maybe it’s not just a new day in Wisconsin but the start of better tomorrows.
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