This Modern World

court decision insured maximum opportunity for minorities to elect representatives from their community. Redistricting is messy, but necessary for honest districts that give every citizen an equal impact on state policies. It can become every person for themselves, and leadership has life and death power over legislative careers. Every legislator is watching, negotiating and begging as the maps continually evolve. Some legislators are encouraged to retire so there are fewer conflicts. Incumbents don’t want to end up in an Assembly district with another member of their own party and have a primary against possibly a very good friend. This could be life or death for their political careers and not as a result of anything they did wrong. Split government obviously prevents gerrymandering, which is why it was so important that Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker since the gerrymandered districts prevented the Democrats from ever winning control of either the Assembly or the Senate. Split government forces a compromise, resulting in more fair and competitive districts or redistricting ends up in the courts. In the past several redistrictings—until the hyper-gerrymandered redistricting of 2011—the courts ended up drawing the maps. Neither side was totally happy, which is how it should end up.

WHAT LENGTHS WILL SPEAKER VOS TAKE TO STAY IN POWER?

Much like his apparent role model, Donald Trump, the current Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos, is preoccupied with power and control and helping his personal interests, not about legislation to improve average people’s lives. People who know Vos say that he will do almost anything to try to stay in power. Since he knows that in almost all recent legislative elections, more votes are cast statewide for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, he might try almost anything whether it’s constitutional or not. As Assembly Speaker, he has unlimited taxpayer dollars to spend on lawyers. So, one unconstitutional tactic that the speaker might try is to redistrict the legislature without passing a bill which requires the governor’s signature. The Republicans tried to redistrict the state legislature without the governor’s signature in the 1960s and the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled against their efforts. Right now, our seven-member state supreme court has four conservatives, three of whom put politics over the law. Those three actually wanted to consider Trump’s ludicrous lawsuits, invalidating some of the votes cast in the 2020 elections, which other judges throughout the country ridiculed. The court’s fourth conservative, Justice Brian Hagedorn, has shown some indications that he will stand up to political pressure and follow the law, including Wisconsin Supreme Court precedent.

GOING FORWARD

Obviously, you don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to know that it was not the intent of the drafters of the Wisconsin constitution to allow the legislature to redistrict itself without the governor’s signature. If that were the case, all one party needed to do was have a majority in both houses during a redistricting year like the Democrats had in the 1991; they could have ignored the Republican governor at the time, gerrymandered the districts and stayed in power forever. Every 10 years they would still be in control of the legislature thanks to their gerrymandered districts and would just do another gerrymander and again stay in power ad infinitum. So, it is important to be vigilant if we don’t want to end up with gerrymandered districts again in this redistricting process. We need to pay attention to what is happening. We need to speak up, organize and demand fair district lines so the American democratic process of compromise can work. It was working somewhat well in Wisconsin until the 2011 redistricting caused Wisconsin to be labeled the most gerrymandered state in the country. We can do better.

Louis Fortis is publisher of the Shepherd Express and a former state legislator and economics professor.