Month: December 2018
Wisconsin GOP uses rare session to weaken incoming governor
Associated Press
Wisconsin GOP uses rare session to weaken incoming governor
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Still stinging from an election loss, Wisconsin Republicans on Monday tried to push through measures that would weaken the incoming Democratic administration and allow outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker to make one last major mark on the state’s political landscape after his re-election defeat in November.
The measures, part of a rare lame-duck session, would change the 2020 presidential primary date at a cost of millions of dollars to benefit a conservative state Supreme Court justice. They would also diminish the governor’s ability to adopt rules that enact state laws and shield the state jobs agency from his control.
Angry opponents filled the hallways of the Wisconsin Capitol, and the hearing room, banging on doors and chanting “Respect our votes!” and “Shame!”
Republicans forged ahead despite threats of lawsuits, claims by Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and others that they were trying to invalidate the election results and howls of protest from hundreds of people who showed up for a public hearing.
The lame-duck maneuvering in Wisconsin is similar to action taken by Republicans in North Carolina two years ago and is being discussed in Michigan before a Democratic governor takes over there.
The protests, coming at the end of Walker’s eight years in office, were reminiscent of tumult that came shortly after he took office in 2011, when he moved to end collective bargaining powers for public sector unions.
Other measures would weaken the attorney general’s office by allowing Republican legislative leaders to intervene in cases and hire their own attorneys. A legislative committee, rather than the attorney general, would have to sign off on withdrawing from federal lawsuits.
That would stop Evers and incoming Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul from fulfilling their campaign promises to withdraw Wisconsin from a multi-state lawsuit seeking repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald downplayed concerns about the lame-duck session, saying, “I don’t think it’s outrageous at all.”
“But listen, I’m concerned,” he said. “I think that Gov.-elect Evers is going to bring a liberal agenda to Wisconsin.”
Walker signaled support for the package.
“All the talk about reining in power, it really doesn’t,” Walker told reporters Monday afternoon at the executive mansion.
Fitzgerald said Walker and his chief of staff were deeply involved in crafting the measures.
Fitzgerald would not say whether there was enough support among Republicans for moving the 2020 presidential primary date, a change that would cost about $7 million and has drawn opposition from nearly every county election official.
Last week, Fitzgerald said that Republicans want to move the 2020 presidential primary, when Democratic turnout is expected to be high, so it won’t be on the same date as an April election where Walker-appointed Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly is on the ballot, thereby improving his chances of victory.
Walker said he has always found it odd that the state holds partisan and nonpartisan races on the same date. The presidential primary is partisan, but state Supreme Court candidates are officially nonpartisan, although Kelly is part of a clear conservative-leaning majority on the high court.
The state Elections Commission unanimously adopted a motion Monday declaring that the shift would be “extraordinarily difficult” and costly without additional funding. Commissioner Mark Thomsen, a Democratic appointee, called the plan “the biggest waste of money for a single person that I can think of” during discussion preceding the vote.
Fitzgerald and other Republican leaders said changes to that proposal and others, including limiting early voting to two weeks before an election, were being considered and could be offered during floor debate Tuesday.
Similar limitations on early voting were found unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2016, and Democrats have threatened legal action again.
A news conference where Fitzgerald and other Republican leaders spoke was peppered with catcalls from protesters.
A Republican-controlled legislative committee planned to hold a public hearing for eight hours Monday, before taking votes late in the night to set up final approval in the Senate and Assembly on Tuesday.
The votes to pass the sweeping package of bills would come about a month before Evers is slated to take office.
It was the first lame-duck session in Wisconsin in eight years. The last such session happened just before Walker took office, when Democrats tried unsuccessfully to approve union contracts.
Last month, Democrats won every constitutional office, including governor and attorney general.
Evers vowed to fight the session, saying lawsuits were being explored. He called on the people of Wisconsin to contact their legislators even as the bills were speeding through. They were just made public late Friday .
“This is rancor and politics as usual,” Evers said in written testimony to the committee. “It flies in the face of democratic institutions and the checks and balances that are intended to prevent power-hungry politicians from clinging to control when they do not get their way.”
The executive director of One Wisconsin Now, which filed a lawsuit challenging the previous attempt to limit early voting, said the GOP’s latest effort shows they “refuse to accept the results of the 2018 elections” and are worried about large voter turnout.
About 565,000 people voted early in the November elections.
Democratic lawmakers who sit on the committee holding the hearing Monday said the scope of the lame-duck session was unprecedented.
“It’s a power grab,” said Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach. “They lost and they’re throwing a fit.”
Erpenbach said expected legal challenges to what is passed could “grind things to a halt” in the Legislature for as much as a year.
Republicans have had majorities in the state Senate and Assembly since 2011 and worked with Walker to pass a host of conservative priorities. The GOP will maintain its majorities in the Legislature next year when Evers takes over.
Associated Press writers Todd Richmond and Ivan Moreno in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
Republican state lawmakers scramble to curb incoming Democrats’ power
Reuters
Republican state lawmakers scramble to curb incoming Democrats’ power
By Joseph Ax, Reuters December 3, 2018
By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) – Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Michigan are scrambling to pass last-minute legislation to limit the powers of incoming Democratic officials before their iron grip on state governments is loosened following last month’s elections.
The Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature began an unusual lame-duck session on Monday to consider bills that would undercut the power of Governor-elect Tony Evers and Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul, Democrats whose victories broke six years of Republican control of the state’s executive and legislative branches.
Michigan Republicans have also introduced legislation to strip some powers from the offices of the state attorney general and secretary of state, which were both captured by Democrats, along with the governorship in the Nov. 6 elections.
The states were among four, including Kansas and New Hampshire, where voters broke Republican “trifectas,” in which one party holds the governorship and both houses of the state legislature.
In both Wisconsin and Michigan, Republicans will continue to control the legislatures but will now have Democratic governors.
Democrats have decried the bills as defying the voters’ will.
“It’s really an attack on our democratic values and structures,” Michigan Democratic Representative Christine Greig, the next minority leader in the state House of Representatives, said. “They’re changing the game, because they didn’t like who was elected.”
Evers called the Republicans’ move an “embarrassment” in a Sunday news conference and suggested he might sue to challenge the new measures.
Republicans defended the efforts.
“The No. 1 priority for us is to restore the balance of powers between the two co-equal branches of governments,” Robin Vos, speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly, said at a news conference on Monday.
LIMITING GOVERNOR’S POWER
An hours-long Monday public hearing on the bills before a Wisconsin legislative committee was repeatedly disrupted by protesters’ shouts, while Democratic lawmakers railed at Republicans.
“You guys are just going crazy here,” said state Representative Katrina Shankland. “It’s like Gremlins past midnight.”
The proposals include preventing the incoming governor from withdrawing Wisconsin from a legal challenge to the federal Affordable Care Act, sidestepping the attorney general’s power to represent the state in litigation and rescheduling a 2020 election to boost the chances of a Republican state Supreme Court Justice, among others.
Speaking to local reporters, Walker defended the decision to hold an extraordinary session but was noncommittal about the bills, saying he would review them after passage.
In Michigan, proposed legislation would allow lawmakers to intervene in legal cases. The legislature is also considering stripping the secretary of state’s office of its oversight over campaign finance law.
A spokeswoman for Michigan Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof said the latter bill would transfer oversight to a “bipartisan entity, rather than a political officeholder.”
Michigan lawmakers also appear poised to weaken new minimum wage and sick time laws. The measures had been set to go to voters in a referendum in November until the legislature preemptively approved them in September.
That maneuver allows Republicans to scale back the laws with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters vote required to change any voter-approved ballot measure.
“I am surprised at just how egregious these are,” said Greig, the incoming House minority leader, who added that any effort to rewrite those laws would be challenged in court.
A spokeswoman for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who would have to sign the bills into law, said he would reserve judgment until they land on his desk.
U.S. Republicans and Democrats have a history of using lame-duck sessions to advance priorities ahead of power shifts. Wisconsin Democrats in 2010 unsuccessfully tried to push through public union contracts after Walker won election while promising to get tough with organized labor.
In North Carolina, Republican legislators attempted to curtail gubernatorial powers after Democrat Roy Cooper was elected in 2016. The state’s lawmakers are now working on implementing a new voter identification ballot measure before January, when Republicans will lose their veto-proof supermajority.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Scott Malone, Frances Kerry and Lisa Shumaker)
Midwestern Republicans Try To Kneecap New Democratic Governors
HuffPost
Midwestern Republicans Try To Kneecap New Democratic Governors
Lame-duck Republican legislatures in two Midwestern states where Democrats seized key state offices in November are trying to kneecap the incoming leaders and change election rules, aiming to consolidate GOP power despite the election results.
In Wisconsin, Republicans aim to limit early voting, change the date of the state’s presidential primary to help a conservative member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court win re-election, limit the governor’s ability to make certain appointments and block Gov.-elect Tony Evers from eliminating a state economic development agency.
To the east, Michigan’s GOP legislators are looking to limit the power of the state’s attorney general and secretary of state over lawsuits and campaign finance reforms. Democrats will take over from Republicans in the two offices.
In both states, the lawmakers are mimicking what happened in North Carolina in 2016, after Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, ousted Republican Pat McCrory. Before Cooper took office, the GOP-dominated Legislature moved to limit his power to make appointments, and it has since consistently tried to alter election rules to help Republicans. Cooper has managed to successfully fight some of the changes with lawsuits.
Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina are all presidential battlegrounds, and in all three states district lines for House and state legislative seats have been heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans. The GOP continues to control both chambers of the legislatures in each state, and Republican leaders want to limit the ability of Democrats to undercut the advances they have made in their conservative agendas.
The last election changed the state in a way that apparently the Legislature has decided to not accept. Wisconsin Gov.-elect Tony Evers (D)
For now, the situation in Wisconsin is most alarming to Democrats.
“The last election changed the state in a way that apparently the Legislature has decided to not accept,” Evers said Monday in Milwaukee.
Evers, who defeated two-term Gov. Scott Walker, and his allies remain hopeful the GOP proposals won’t pass and get signed into law, but some progressive groups have already begun discussing lawsuits.
In an interview with a conservative talk radio host, Wisconsin’s state Senate majority leader was blunt when asked why the changes were necessary: to water down the power of the governor’s office before Evers is in the job.
“We trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back and forth with the Legislature,” Sen. Scott Fitzgerald said, calling Democratic protests “manufactured outrage.”
He added, “We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas.”
A key Wisconsin legislative committee held a hearing on the bills on Monday, and a vote could come as early as Tuesday. While the GOP has a large majority in Wisconsin’s Assembly, they have a much smaller margin in the Senate, where just two Republican defections could doom the legislation. The state’s chapter of Indivisible and other grassroots groups are organizing protests and putting pressure on GOP senators from swing districts.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin and the director of its Elections Research Center, said Republicans were “shocked and dismayed” after losing all five statewide races this fall.
“What the Republicans have left is the Supreme Court and the state Legislature,” he said in an interview. “The moving of the primary is a way to protect a conservative justice on the Supreme Court, and they’ve said that very openly. There’s nothing secret to them about that. That’s the plan.”
The plan would move the date of the state’s 2020 presidential primary from April to March, while keeping the election for the court seat in April. With a competitive Democratic presidential race and no real GOP challenge to President Donald Trump, liberal turnout is likely to be sky-high. By separating the presidential primary from the court contest,, Republicans hope a conservative judge will have a better shot at re-election.
Sixty of the 72 county clerks in Wisconsin oppose moving the primary date. On Monday, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously to send written testimony to the Legislature saying that moving the primary date would be “extraordinarily difficult” and could cost the state between $6.4 and $6.8 million.
Burden said that if the Republicans were successful in jamming through the last-minute changes, it could set an alarming precedent for lawmakers when future changes in statewide offices occur.
“It’s terrible. One of the things that the Senate majority leader said today is that they were doing these things because they didn’t trust the incoming governor. Well, doing these kinds of things actually sows mistrust,” he said.
Efforts “to try to ram through a bunch of things before (a new governor) can even have a say”is going to “taint relations between the legislative branch and the executive branch immediately,” he said.
Democrats are more hopeful they’ll be able to stop the proposed changes in Michigan, where Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer won her race by a healthy margin and where outgoing GOP Gov. Rick Snyder has stayed neutral toward the Republican legislation.
It was the Republican effort in North Carolina to strip power from Cooper before he took office that provided a model for Wisconsin legislators to borrow from, said Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, a good government group.
“The fact that North Carolina was able to do that to… Cooper and that the lame-duck Republican [governor] was there long enough to be able to sign some of the legislation to curtail some of the power of the new governor… I think this was something that the Republican legislative leaders looked at” in Wisconsin, he said.
The Democratic Governors’ Association, which spent heavily to help elect Evers and Whitmer, predicted the GOP attempts to curtail the new governors’ would prove self-defeating.
“These legislatures are the worst kind of sore losers. When your football team loses the game, you can’t change the rules to make a field goal worth 10 points instead,” said Jared Leopold, the group’s communications director. “But that’s exactly the dangerous game that Republican legislatures are playing. This amounts to political self-sabotage: These illegal actions will be thrown out in court, while damaging the states’ reputation and economies.”
Michigan Republicans scramble to rig the game before they lose power
MSNBC
The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog
Michigan Republicans scramble to rig the game before they lose power
We talked earlier about Wisconsin Republicans, after suffering a series of losses, scrambling to overhaul state government, rigging the game in their favor, before they’re forced to relinquish power in the new year. As it happens, an eerily similar situation is unfolding in a state next door.
For the first time in nearly three decades, voters in Michigan elected a Democratic governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. As the Detroit Free Press reported the other day, GOP state legislators don’t appear to be taking it well:
As Democratic candidates prepare to take three statewide offices on Jan. 1 – governor, attorney general and secretary of state – Republican lawmakers introduced bills Thursday to challenge their authority.
State Rep. Robert VerHeulen, R-Walker, introduced a bill that would allow the state House of Representatives and Senate to intervene in any legal proceedings involving the state, which has traditionally been the purview of the state attorney general or the governor’s office.
In addition, state Sen. David Robertson, R-Grand Blanc, introduced a bill that would shift oversight of campaign finance law from the secretary of state to a six-person commission appointed by the governor. The panel members would be nominated by the state Republican and Democratic parties.
And that’s really just the start. The GOP-led state legislature – where Republicans rule thanks to one of the nation’s most egregiously gerrymandered maps – immediately got to work “substantially” scaling back minimum wage and paid-sick-leave laws approved by Michigan voters.
The Detroit Free Press’ Brian Dickerson called this what it is: a partisan “smash-and-grab.”
The question is whether outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who declined to endorse his party’s far-right candidate in the race to succeed him, intends to go along with these Republican schemes. As Dickerson put it, the retiring two-term governor “must decide whether he wishes to be remembered as the conservative accountant who brought order to Michigan’s fiscal house or the GOP apparatchik who enabled his party’s 11th-hour smash-and-grab.”
The path Snyder prefers is not yet clear.
Walmart is the poster child of corporate greed in America today
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders
December 2, 2018
Walmart is the poster child of corporate greed in America today. We must demand that they pay a living wage.
Walmart Profits Off of Workers' Suffering
Walmart is the poster child of corporate greed in America today. We must demand that they pay a living wage.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday, December 2, 2018
Experts deliver grim news on climate change!
Black People are left out of the gun control debate!
CollegeHumor with truTV
Watch an all-new @Adam Ruins Everything on truTV every Tuesday 10/9C!
Everyone Leaves Black People Out Of The Gun Debate
Watch an all-new @Adam Ruins Everything on truTV every Tuesday 10/9C! #AdamRuins
Posted by CollegeHumor on Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Michigan Republicans move to gut minimum wage and paid sick leave laws
Daily Kos
Michigan Republicans move to gut minimum wage and paid sick leave laws
With Rick Snyder on his way out, Michigan Republicans have to work fast.
Michigan Republicans are following through on a twisted plan they laid in September, when they somehow managed to make the act of passing a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave evil. By passing those bills, they intended to, and did, block ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage and passing paid sick leave. Voters didn’t get a chance to have their say on the policies because they were already law, while leaving them easily amended during the lame duck session. That’s what Republicans are gearing up to do now.
One ballot initiative that Republicans blocked would have raised the minimum wage to $12 in 2022. They’re now planning to push that back to 2030. That puts Michigan well behind Missouri, where voters passed a $12 minimum wage in 2023 this November. Michigan Republicans also plan to block tipped workers from eventually getting the full minimum wage. But they’re not done there. They’re also gearing up to slash the number of hours of paid sick leave that workers get, while exempting businesses with as many as 50 employees from the requirement.
Republicans are telling the usual lies about how terrible and job-killing these laws would be if not eviscerated, but come on! Ten states and Washington, D.C., have paid sick leave and more than half the states in the nation, Michigan included, have minimum wages above the federal level of $7.25 an hour. Study after study shows that economies do just fine. And the fact that Republicans cut and ran from a ballot vote, instead using dirty tricks to keep these popular policies off the ballot and then turning around and gutting them, shows that they know their arguments don’t hold water.
The good news is that once Democratic Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer is sworn in, there will at least be a check on the Republican power to be this slimy and dishonest.