CAPiTOL EYE
by WisPolitics.com staff
Mapping management
New Evers maps on the way to state Supreme Court plan could reduce GOP influence Gov. Tony Evers has sent the state Supreme Court a proposed legislative map his office says makes fewer changes to current lines than the GOP lawmakers’ version while adding one more majority Black Assembly seat. The guv’s office also said his proposed maps for the Legislature and Congress would have more partisan balance than the ones Republicans drew. He vetoed the GOP maps last month. Republicans slammed Evers for submitting a map that was drawn in private after he publicly committed to a public process through the People’s Maps Commission. In a joint statement, Senate Majority Leader Devin Lemahieu, R-Oostburg, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, noted bipartisan supermajorities in both houses voted against the People’s Maps Commission proposals when they were on the floor last month. “Now Governor Evers has abandoned his campaign rhetoric promising for independently-drawn maps to rapidly and secretly draw his own rigged maps without public input,” they said. “The hypocrisy of the governor is impossible to ignore.” The state Supreme Court last month directed parties in the redistricting case to take a least-change approach to the proposals submitted to the justices by yesterday’s deadline. The final version of the map Evers’ commission drew proposed significant changes to current lines, and Evers noted the court would only consider proposals “that make minimal changes from the gerrymandered maps that we have now.” He called the maps he submitted yesterday an improvement from the ones he vetoed. “But I want to be clear — the people of Wisconsin
overwhelmingly support nonpartisan redistricting in this state, and I will continue to fight for a nonpartisan redistricting process as long as I’m governor,” Evers said. Meanwhile, Republicans submitted to the court the maps that were passed by the state Legislature last month without any changes. A WisPolitics.com review of those maps showed Joe Biden would’ve won more votes than Donald Trump in 35 Assembly seats that Republicans proposed and 11 Senate districts. Under the current lines, Biden won 37 and 11 as he took the statewide contest by more than 20,000 votes. The GOP maps also included six majority Black Assembly districts and two Hispanic seats in that chamber. They also included two majority Black Senate districts. Evers’ office said his map would have 55 GOP Assembly districts and 44 Dem seats with a 20-13 split in Republicans’ favor in the Senate. That calculation used the average of six statewide elections since 2016.
Vos: Session could be extended to incorporate Gableman findings
Speaker Robin Vos says the Assembly could be in later than usual this session to give former Justice Michael Gableman more time to wrap up a 2020 election review so
lawmakers can incorporate his findings when writing new bills. The Rochester Republican, in a WisPolitics.com yearend interview yesterday, sought to blame Dems for a delay in Gableman’s timeline. The effort originally targeted October for an end date, but Vos said Dems have put up a series of roadblocks to hamper the efforts. Minority Leader Gordon Hintz charged Assembly Republicans are looking to extend the probe as long as they can and may take it past the 2022 election. The Oshkosh Dem said doing so would imply there was something wrong with how the 2020 election played out and avoid having to finally admit to some in the GOP base that the review’s results will be disappointing. “For some of them, if Trump isn’t reinstated, they didn’t get to the bottom of it,” Hintz told WisPolitics.com. The pair spoke with WisPolitics.com in separate interviews yesterday with Gableman’s investigation facing court hearings that will likely push any conclusion into the early part of 2022. A Dane County judge has a hearing set for Dec. 23 on Dem AG Josh Kaul’s effort to quash the subpoena Gableman issued to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, arguing the statute gives the former justice the power to compel testimony in public before a legislative hearing, not in private at his Brookfield office.
WI senators approve National Defense Authorization Act
Wisconsin’s senators alongside their colleagues approved
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