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Stories of injustice and justice
December 4, 2018
“Republicans have attempted to steal a Congressional election in North Carolina with the most brazen electoral fraud in a generation.”
"Republicans have attempted to steal a Congressional election in North Carolina with the most brazen electoral fraud in a generation."
Posted by MoveOn on Tuesday, December 4, 2018
December 5, 2018
Unless we take bold action to address climate change, Florida will literally be drowning at the end of the century.
Climate Change Is Drowning Florida
Unless we take bold action to address climate change, Florida will literally be drowning at the end of the century.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, December 5, 2018
December 5, 2018
Medicare for All: Better Care at a Lower Cost
Expanded and improved Medicare for All means lower costs and better care. For current Medicare beneficiaries, it would eliminate out of pocket costs and add dental, vision, hearing, and long term care coverage.
Posted by Social Security Works on Wednesday, December 5, 2018
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Latest on Wisconsin Republican lawmakers moving to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general (all times local):
10:50 p.m.
The Wisconsin Senate has passed a bill in a lame-duck session to enact a Medicaid work requirement.
The bill approved late Tuesday night is part of a package of proposals being sought by Republicans before Gov. Scott Walker leaves office in five weeks.
The measure approved on a party-line vote would prevent incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers from withdrawing a federal waiver request to implement the work requirement for able-bodied adults under age 50.
The proposal makes a host of other changes to Medicaid that more than two dozen health care providers, insurers and hospitals warned could have unintended consequences.
The bill also requires new legislative oversight of waiver requests related to health care made by the governor, a move Democrats decried as a power shift designed to handcuff the new administration.
The measure now heads to the Assembly, which was expected to pass it late Tuesday or early Wednesday.
___
10:30 p.m.
The Wisconsin Assembly has started debating Republican lame-duck legislation designed to weaken incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul.
The package would prohibit Evers from authorizing Kaul to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act. Legislators could hire outside attorneys to represent the state, pushing Kaul to the sidelines, and require Kaul to get legislative approval before settling cases.
The bills would weaken Evers’ ability to promulgate administrative rules that enact laws and prohibit his appointees from controlling the state job-creation agency.
Assembly debate was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. but didn’t get underway until almost 10:30 p.m. Republicans in the Assembly and Senate spent hours trying to reach agreement on what to take up.
___
8 p.m.
A lame-duck legislative session in Wisconsin designed to weaken the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general is in limbo for now.
Both the state Assembly and Senate were scheduled to vote on a package of bills Tuesday that won committee approval late Monday.
But the Assembly had yet to convene seven hours after it was scheduled to start.
The Senate approved 82 appointments and one transportation-related bill, but Republicans broke for a caucus and showed no signs of emerging as of 8 p.m.
Democrats and opponents were hopeful the delays showed Republicans didn’t have the votes to pass the most significant measures.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald shook his head “no” when asked during the break whether he had a deal.
___
3:55 p.m.
The Wisconsin Senate has voted to approve 82 appointees of outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker during a lame-duck legislative session.
The appointees were approved by a party-line vote, with Republicans in support and Democrats against.
Democratic senators objected, as did Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers in a letter submitted minutes before the Senate took up the appointments.
The appointees include naming Scott Beightol to the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents. The attorney replaces Bryan Steil, who resigned last week after winning election to Congress replacing retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Walker also appointed his top aide Ellen Nowak to a position on the state Public Service Commission, guaranteeing she’ll have a job after he leaves office next month.
___
3:35 p.m.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and his Republican colleagues are defending lame-duck legislation that would weaken incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul.
They say the bills ensure the Legislature will be equal to the governor. Republican lawmakers were set to vote Tuesday on the legislation.
Vos said during a news conference before the Assembly took the floor that the GOP wants to make sure Evers doesn’t erase achievements Republicans have made over the last eight years with Gov. Scott Walker in office.
Vos added that his constituents want him to protect Republican ideas. He says the Legislature must be considered a co-equal branch of state government.
He said that he, Senate Majority Scott Fitzgerald and Walker had discussed limiting the governor’s power this spring. He made the same assertion during a news conference Monday.
___
3:25 p.m.
Members of the public are being allowed to return to the Wisconsin Senate gallery after being removed for ignoring warnings to remain quiet.
Republican Senate President Roger Roth ordered the galleries cleared shortly after debate began Tuesday. That led to an outburst of anger and shouts of “Shame!” from those forced to leave.
After about a 40-minute break, Roth said leaders from both parties agreed to let the public back in with the understanding that those being disruptive would be removed and everyone could be kicked out if there are repeated problems.
The Senate is debating lame-duck measures taking power away from the Democratic-elect governor and attorney general.
___
2:45 p.m.
Republican Wisconsin Senate President Roger Roth ordered the public to be removed from Senate galleries, minutes after the start of a lame-duck session to weaken incoming Democratic office holders.
The public erupted into shouts of “Shame!” and “Whose house? Our house!” after the order for police to clear the galleries. Roth says he was ordering the public removed for not heeding repeated warnings to remain quiet during debate.
The state Senate is meeting Tuesday in an unusual lame-duck session to consider sweeping proposals that would weaken incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul.
The disruption brought Senate debate to a halt as people slowly left and shouted down at the senators.
___
2:30 p.m.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is criticizing protesters who jeered him during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
The protesters took aim at Walker as Republican legislators prepare to vote on several proposals aimed at weakening Walker’s incoming Democratic successor. Walker supports the measures.
Some of their shouts and songs drowned out a high school choir that was performing during the ceremony.
Walker tweeted that he “can handle the shouts, but leave the kids alone.”
___
2:10 p.m.
Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers is ripping Republican Gov. Scott Walker for “jamming” through scores of last-minute appointees in a lame-duck legislative session.
Republicans planned to vote Tuesday on legislation that would limit Evers’ powers as well as restrict incoming Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. The Senate is also slated to confirm about 75 Walker appointees, including two new members of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents.
Evers sent Walker a letter on Tuesday complaining that the appointees haven’t been fully vetted and that some haven’t filed statements of economic interest. He asked Walker to withdraw the names to allow ample time for review.
Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg didn’t immediately reply to an email seeking comment.
___
12:55 p.m.
Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker elicited boos and howls of protest as he threw the switch lighting the state Christmas tree.
Walker presided over the ceremony in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda on Tuesday. It came as Republican lawmakers prepared to vote on lame-duck session measures to weaken powers of the incoming Democratic governor.
Protesters held signs that read “Stop the GOP Madness” and “All I Want for Christmas is Democracy” as Walker attended the ceremony. A high school choir singing Christmas carols was largely drowned out by protesters outside the Senate chamber singing their own anti-Walker tunes.
As the ceremony ended, protesters chanted and yelled, “Hey Walker, go home!”
Walker left without taking questions.
___
12:45 p.m.
Former Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle says the state’s Legislature “is sinking to new depths” as Republicans attempt to weaken the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
Doyle spoke Tuesday as Republicans prepared to take action on a number of bills to strip key powers of Gov.-elect Tony Evers and new Attorney General Josh Kaul.
Doyle was governor from 2003 to 2011.
He compared the transitions he had with Republican opponents he defeated to become attorney general and then governor and says what’s happening in Wisconsin “is completely different.”
He says former Republican Gov. Scott McCallum was “nothing but gracious and open and accepting” when Doyle defeated him in 2002.
He slammed the GOP proposals now as “unconstitutional violations of separations of powers.”
___
12:05 p.m.
Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly are branding a Republican lame-duck session as “illegitimate” and are eschewing debate limits, setting up a potential filibuster.
Republicans are expected to vote Tuesday on bills that would weaken Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul.
Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz told reporters before lawmakers took the floor that the legislation is a power-grab that ignores the will of voters who elected Evers and Kaul.
Democrats and Republicans traditionally agree on time limits for debates, but Hintz said no agreement was reached for this debate. He says the session is “illegitimate” and there will be no rules. He declined to elaborate.
Assembly Democrats filibustered for 60 straight hours in 2011 in a vain attempt to stop Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining restrictions.
___
11:40 a.m.
Eight former leaders of Wisconsin’s economic development agency who served under both Republicans and Democrats are speaking out against changes proposed in a lame-duck legislative session.
The former directors issued a statement Tuesday as the Republican-controlled Legislature prepared to pass a proposal weakening the governor’s control over the state economic development agency.
The proposal would give the majority party in the Legislature more appointments than the governor to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. Two of the eight people who signed the statement were appointed by outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker. A third served under former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.
The other five served under former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.
Incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers has said he wants to reorganize the job-creation agency.
___
11:05 a.m.
Wisconsin’s incoming Democratic attorney general is predicting multiple lawsuits challenging Republican lame-duck legislation limiting the powers of both his office and Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers.
Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul told reporters Tuesday that the legislation undermines the will of voters who elected him and Evers.
He says the legislation is “virtually certain” to generate lawsuits across multiple courts. He says the state will be mired in litigation next year.
The legislation would allow legislators to replace the attorney general with outside attorneys in cases, require lawmakers to sign off on settlements, send settlement dollars to the state general fund and prohibit the governor from authorizing the attorney general to withdraw from lawsuits.
Kaul says that’s designed to prevent Evers from ordering him to withdraw from a multi-state lawsuit challenging federal health care laws.
___
1:29 a.m.
Wisconsin Republicans are planning dramatic lame-duck votes in the state Legislature on a sweeping attempt to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
Opponents decried the moves as a last-gasp power grab and an attempt to invalidate the election where Republican Gov. Scott Walker was defeated.
Once approved by the Legislature on Tuesday, the measures would head to Walker for his signature just five weeks before he is replaced by Democrat Tony Evers.
A Republican-controlled committee voted to approve the bills around midnight Monday, following a nine-hour public hearing where all but one person spoke against the measures.
A proposal to move the 2020 presidential primary election from April to March appears to be dead after the committee did not vote to advance it.
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.
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)
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.
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.”
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.
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
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