1. Republican Lawmakers in Michigan and Wisconsin. Two years ago, Republicans in North Carolina undertook a brazen power grab after their nominee — the sitting governor — lost re-election by deciding to weaken the governor’s office. The state legislature passed two bills stripping the governor of some powers, and the outgoing governor, Pat McCrory, signed them.
In doing so, McCrory and his allies rejected the peaceful transfer of power that is essential to democracy. They instead chose the peaceful transfer of some power.
In 2018, it became clear that this problem extended beyond North Carolina. Republicans in Michigan and Wisconsin are now following a similar script to protect partisan GOP power. Let’s see:
Michigan. 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, which is what the Republican Michigan legislature is doing.
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. Horse crap. 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 hope is that when 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. But not so fast, Republican lawmakers have passed legislation that will reduce the authority of the new governor in areas as campaign finance oversight and other legal matters.
Wisconsin. Not to be outshined by Michigan’s sour grapes attack on democracy, Republicans in Wisconsin are using the remaining lame-duck session to pass legislation that will take key policy making and appointment powers away from the newly elected governor Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul while expanding that of the Republican-held legislature. Their goal is to make it harder for Evers to take action on the very health care, economic development, and ethics issues he he was elected to address.
Chalk up another embarrassment for Wisconsin—a historically progressive state that has seen its reputation badly damaged by the constant maneuvering of Walker and his fellow Republicans to undermine voting rights and consolidate power.
Here’s analysis by Dan Kaufman in The New York Times:
No one is really bothering to hide the purpose of this lame duck legislation: to continue the Republicans’ hold on state government, even at the expense of core democratic principles like respect for the separation of powers and majority rule. The legislation would nullify the decision-making of Wisconsin’s voters, who rejected Republicans for every statewide office in the November midterms.
The lame duck legislation will, for example, prevent Mr. Evers from fulfilling a campaign promise to take Wisconsin out of a multistate lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act. It will also diminish the governor’s control over the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, a scandal-ridden public-private agency created by Mr. Walker to foster job creation, by giving the legislature an equal number of appointees to the board as the governor and revoking the governor’s power to appoint the board’s chief executive. It will also limit early voting to two weeks. The new bills have cleared both chambers of the state legislature and are now awaiting the signature of outgoing Governor Scott Walker.
These GOP initiatives—along with an attempt by North Carolina Republican legislators to implement a new voter-identification measure before they lose their veto-proof supermajority in January—are assaults on the concept of a peaceful transition of power. Instead of respecting the clear desire of the voters for new leadership, Republicans are scrambling to rewrite the rules and disempower the officials that the people of their states elected on November 6.
This notion of a shared future is at the heart of our regard as a people for the orderly transfer of authority from the loser of an election to the winner. If the country is to function as a democratic republic, there must be respect for the electoral process that allows the voters to determine who will exercise power—even when defeated candidates and defeated parties feel that the voters have gotten things wrong. Once the ballots have been counted—and recounted where necessary—the results are certified and the struggle for power is supposed to be finished.
2. Florida Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis. The same election that put DeSantis in office put an end to the state’s retrograde policy of making felons apply for their voting rights to be restored—or, at least, it should have. Florida voters passed Amendment 4 by an enormous margin, but DeSantis has already announced his intention to delay and narrow its benefits.
Amendment 4 specified that non-violent felons should have their rights restored. It was meant to be self-implementing, or automatic. Instead of accepting Floridians’ vote, Republicans are going to continue their war on voting rights, which has been anything but subtle. Outgoing Gov. Rick Scott used his prerogative to restore voting rights twice as frequently for white felons. Scott’s not the first Florida governor to selectively restore voting rights, but his Republican-to-Democrat rights-restoration numbers are the worst since 1971.
DeSantis claims that Amendment 4 must be implemented via legislation. If that were true, Republicans would be able to stall until March’s legislative session even though multiple counties have elections scheduled between now and then. Then there’s the likelihood—which DeSantis has already hinted at—that Republicans would produce a bill that limits as strictly as possible the people to which Amendment 4 applies. How could they do this? They could determine as few offenses as possible qualify as “non-violent.”
More than likely, the self-implementing versus must-have-legislation fight will take Amendment 4 to the courts. Let’s hope Florida’s judges have more integrity than DeSantis and his ilk.
3. Rep. Louie Gohmert. The moronic congressman is on a warpath. He’s jumping on the Fox News bandwagon vilifying China by echoing the network’s attacks on Google. Gohmert makes a clearly well-worn and on-brand right-wing conspiracy joke about George Orwell. He then explains how Google has “literally sold their souls” to China. The problem with putting an erratic and unsophisticated mind and mouth in front of a microphone is that, so very frequently, they veer off into truly insane (and thinly-veiled) anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
In a truly tortured segue, Gohmert connected George Orwell to another George—Soros. Get it?
“You mention Orwell, it reminds me of another George, ah George Soros. Because Google is born in a free country and they go over and oppress others, help oppress others in another country. George Soros is supposed to be Jewish but you wouldn't know it from the damage he inflicted on Israel and the fact that he turned on fellow Jews & helped take the property that they owned.”
I was surprised that Gohmert didn’t pull out his Glenn Beck blackboard to begin drawing lines between Hitler, the Rothschilds, George Soros, and black ops helicopters. If Louie Gohmert has a “brand,” it’s called “Batshit Crazy.” The awfulness of Gohmert’s claim, so grotesquely wedged into a conversation about China, further validates his reputation as America’s dumbest congressman—also the most anti-Semitic.
4. Tucker Carlson, Fox News Conservative Political Commentator. The notorious immigrant basher upped his bigoted game with this latest rambling missive:
“Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement….Previous leaders of our country committed sins -- we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans. That's the argument they make… What is more predictable is how leaders of the caravan are starting to talk. Suddenly, they sound like community college professors from Long Beach. Entitled, cut off from reality, and highly aggressive… Yesterday a group of leaders of the caravan marched into the U.S. consulate in Mexico and demanded $50,000 to return to their own countries…Huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Nope, cynical shakedown artists who have been watching too much CNN. No surprise there. When rich liberals tell you that America owes you a comfortable life, nobody should be shocked when you believe them.”
There are no words to describe this despicable human garbage.
5. Texas Senator John Cornyn. As always, when there is a mass shooting in America, Republicans go out of their way to blame everything except guns. The mass shooting in Santa Fe Texas that left eight students and two teachers dead was no exception. But this may be a first: a Republican senator seems to be blaming … the victims?
Cornyn echoed Antonios Pagourtzis, father of accused Texas shooter, who defended his son by saying the 17-year-old was a ‘good boy’ who had been bullied and ‘mistreated at school.’
Oh, well, okay then. The killer’s dad—who, by the way, owned the unsecured guns used in the mass murder—doesn’t blame his son; it’s his damn fellow students. Sounds legit enough for John Cornyn to run with it. Because it’s never, ever, ever the gun’s fault.
Thoughts and prayers.
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And the Winner is …..
The struggle over American democracy is perhaps the most significant news story of the Trump Era, a struggle that goes to the core of American ideals and that will affect politics for years. Power grabs by North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin represent just part of the election problem. Other states controlled by Republican legislatures are attacking fundamental principles of democratic voting by making it difficult to vote, through such measures as requiring proof of identity and even citizenship, closing polling places, prohibiting late registration, cancelling registration status for people who haven’t voted in recent elections, and, the most absurd, restricting Native Americans voters because they do not have a physical address. Instead of reflecting on why they did so poorly in the November Mid-terms and addressing the reasons, the predictable Republican response will likely be to reduce the numbers of potential Democrat voters. And so it goes.
Accordingly, even though there are other December IGGY-worthy candidates (and since I have eliminated Trump’s bevy of lies and absurdities), this month’s winner is lawmakers in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Hard to argue with your choice, but the Wisconsin, Michigan and NC Republicans efforts to secure their power and incumbency is not confined to the GOP. The NY State Assembly Democrats have for years gerrymandered their districts to guarantee their seats with the tacit help of the State Senate Republicans, who, in return get the Assembly Democrats to allow them the same "courtesy." And most recently, the Democratic-controlled New Jersey State legislature boldly developed a plan to rearrange NJ districts to secure their continued control of both houses. Apparently, however, NJ Democrats were more sensitive than MI, WI and NC Republicans to the subsequent negative reaction since they abandoned the plan. All were politicians acting on most politicians' number one priority, i.e., securing re-election. So, my vote goes to Governor DeSantis. In undermining the will of the electorate (who. btw, cast substantially more votes for the amendment than they cast for him), thereby depressing a potentially large number of new, disproportionately minority, voters for the Democrats, he is solidly confirming his position as one of the country's most ignominious, self-serving, mean spirited and racist politicians. How many times will voters support his moral bankruptcy? After awhile you have to think that the fault lies not in our political "stars," but in ourselves. To some extent, we are all in our own ways, complicit.
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