NEWS TAKING LIBERTIES
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Ten years later, raucous tea party rallies waving racist slogans and caricatures of Obama as an African witch doctor have grown into lawless mob violence against American democracy itself. An unethical TV celebrity seized the dark undercurrent of racial hatred in the Republican Party to win election as the first openly white supremacist president in modern history.
MOB VIOLENCE Donald Trump’s single term began with mob violence by notorious Klansmen and neo-Nazi supporters in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. It ended with another violent mob attack Jan. 6 on the U.S. Capitol bludgeoning police senseless and threatening to murder members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president. After those deadly riots, Trump praised supporters who participated as “very fine people” and “very special.”
Republicans Want to Continue Their Corrupt Destruction of Democracy for 10 More Years BY JOEL MCNALLY
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t’s no surprise Republican legislators want to perpetuate for 10 more years the corruptly gerrymandered legislative and congressional Wisconsin voting districts they created a decade ago, but it’s absurd. The governor and the legislature are required by law to draw new voting districts every 10 years to reflect population changes after every census. And population’s not all that’s changed dramatically in state and national politics over the past decade. The racist tea party election of 2010, an anti-government white backlash to the 2008 election of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president, elected extreme rightwing Republicans in Wisconsin and many other states. Wisconsin’s reputation as politically progressive was transformed overnight with the election of Scott Walker as governor and Ron Johnson as U.S. Senator. 12 | SHEPHERD EXPRESS
The largest voter turnout in history defeated Trump after four years, but Republicans continue passing voter suppression laws and gerrymandering elections to disenfranchise voters in 2021 just as they did in 2011. Gerrymandering requires “packing and cracking”—packing Democrats into the fewest possible voting districts while scattering others into so many different districts they will always remain a powerless minority. Sophisticated computer algorithms can draw voting maps producing lopsided majorities for Republicans even when more votes are cast for Democrats. In 2011, Walker and Republicans had total control of redistricting to shamelessly destroy representative democracy in Wisconsin. Three federal appeals court judges ruled Republicans unconstitutionally violated voting rights by gerrymandering boundaries to assure Republicans would retain a majority of 54 seats in the 99-seat Assembly even if they won only 48% of the vote.
HOW LOSERS ‘WIN’ ELECTIONS That actually underestimated the Republican corruption. The disputed maps were used in 2012 while Republicans appealed and ultimately prevailed. As predicted, Republicans won only 48% of the vote but it resulted in Republicans winning 60 Assembly seats. Despite winning more Assembly votes, Democrats won only 39 seats. Even during the disastrous 2018 midterms for Republicans when Democrats won every statewide election led by Gov. Tony Evers’s defeat of Walker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election, the Democratic sweep did nothing to reduce what had grown into a 63-seat Republican Assembly majority. Demographic experts estimate Democrats would have to defeat Republicans by 10 or 12 percentage points statewide to have any chance of winning an Assembly majority. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work. Wisconsin Republicans are trying to pretend they’re not the minority party that lost the last two statewide elections. It’s long past time to replace a dishonest voting map created 10 years ago that never truthfully reflected the choices of Wisconsin voters
