Backwards!
On Friday, Gov. Tony Evers announced action on 43 bills. He signed a third of them and vetoed the rest. The ones he signed are mostly technical, minor changes in the law. He approved a certification program for the Dentistry Examining Board. He allowed the use of green, not just red or amber, lights on public highways. He changed the number of vendors the Department of Corrections must use when they allow an inmate to purchase hobby, religious or personal items. He extended partial legal immunity to charities that provide used eyeglasses to people.
By contrast, the bills vetoed by the governor were sweeping, partisan and made to stick in political ads. One would have disallowed local government officials from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine to obtain service. Another would have reinstated a FoodShare work requirement. A third would have ended Medicaid for anybody who receives a job offer. A fourth would have dissolved Milwaukee Public Schools. A fifth would have allowed a citizen to bypass the Wisconsin Elections Commission if they wanted to sue a local elections oficial.
What is going on here? This is government dysfunction in full glory. It is a governor, a centrist Democrat, forever battling with a Trump-leaning Republican legislature. Neither the governor nor the legislature can pass anything of substance. The state’s motto is “Forward!” Yet we are going backwards.
You could blame this dog-and-cat fight on our corrosive, highly polarized national politics. Here, you wouldn’t be wrong. But we see something else happening. We see the effects of gerrymandering. Tony Evers got elected governor by a whisker at 49.55 percent of the statewide vote. That’s hardly a Democratic landslide, but it bears no resemblance to the partisan split in the legislature. The state senate is dominated by Republicans, 21-12, while, over in assembly, the GOP holds a 61-38 majority. The same people who voted for governor voted for the state legislature. You’d think the partisan split would be narrow, not gaping. But that’s where gerrymandering comes in. It can turn purple districts bright red by making other districts dark blue. Locked in majorities, enforced by gerrymandered maps, make political compromise either rare or impossible. They create a culture that rewards legislators sending the governor bills he’ll never sign. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, also acting on Friday, made this dismal situation worse. In a 4-3 decision, the high court cemented in place the current government misery for another 10 years. They chose a Republican legislature redistricting plan that keeps in place the 2010 extreme gerrymander. The court’s decision was horrible. The majority of justices, after being cautioned by the U.S. Supreme Court that Gov. Evers’ maps may violate the Voting Right Act, adopted Republican maps they rejected only last month. Justice Brian Hagedorn, the court’s swing vote, said it would have been good to fully explore the Voting Rights Act issue, but the process had run out of time. In her dissent, Justice Jill Karofsky argued that the state high court not only reversed itself on its own “least change” redistricting criteria but also, in approving a Republican plan that lowers the number of politically effective black districts in Milwaukee from six to five, likely violated the Voting Rights Act.
The court’s redistricting decision–in essence overruling Gov. Evers’ veto–ensures another decade of gerrymandered malfunction where the sitting governor and state legislature might as well live on different planets.
Under these conditions, democracy struggles. The sitting governor must heed the views of statewide majorities. The Supreme Court, however, now makes princes out of legislators. They can defy public opinion, scoff at compromise. These junior monarchs revel in extremism.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has cast the state legislature in redistricting amber. Locked in place, democratic change can’t happen.
The squabble that is Madison politics won’t end anytime soon. The people on the Dentistry Examining Board may get what they need from state government. The rest of us, both Democrat and Republican, are out of luck.
Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
