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Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan Undermine Democracy, Don't Give a Sh-t
Rather than doing the soul-searching that should follow a massive electoral loss, Republicans are changing the rules to shield themselves from election outcomes. They are making the government less responsive to the popular will.
In 2016 to little national coverage, North Carolina wrote the playbook Wisconsin and Michigan are using to undermine democracy.
Democrat Roy Cooper was weeks away from being sworn in as the new governor of North Carolina, when outgoing Republican Gov. Pat McCrory called a special session of the legislature.... to severely limit the incoming Democratic governor’s power.
Within 48 hours, on a late December night in 2016, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a series of bills that pulled Cooper’s ability to make key cabinet appointments without their approval, drastically cut the size of Cooper’s administration, and changed the Board of Elections so that Republicans would control it in election years.
Democrats — who thought of Cooper’s victory as one of the few bright spots in an otherwise devastating year for the party — were blindsided. “To pull off an ambush like that, all the Republicans had to be in on it,” state Sen. Jeff Jackson (D) said. “They started filing bills that were 40 pages long. They had been working on this for weeks.”
Now two years later we stand here shocked and furious beyond words as Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan are staring down the same fate. Republican-majority legislatures are pushing to pass sweeping changes to voter access, the judiciary, and the governors’ abilities to enact the policies they campaigned — and won — on. The 141-page bill unveiled seemingly out-of-nowhere, was given a few minutes of "hearings":
The Wisconsin Republican Party is nullifying the results of the 2018 election. In the middle of the night Tuesday [12/4/18] into Wednesday, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill that seizes key powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
The bill blocks Evers’s ability to change state welfare policy and withdraw from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — two things he campaigned on. It limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. The bill gives the legislature more power over the boards of certain commissions, like the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), and limits Evers’s abilities to change the state’s work requirement laws around food stamps and health care....
.... rushed through quickly in an explicit effort to weaken Democrats and prevent the new governor from doing what he was elected to do. In essence, Wisconsin Republicans are telling the state’s voters that their preferences will be ignored.
Meanwhile in Michigan, Republicans are making similar plans while delaying minimum wage increases and limited sick leave.
The Republican-led Michigan Legislature on Tuesday passed bills that would delay a minimum wage hike and scale back paid sick leave requirements, an unprecedented lame-duck strategy.... despite criticism that it is unconstitutional.
To prevent minimum wage and paid sick time ballot initiatives from going to the electorate last month....GOP legislators — at the behest of business groups — preemptively approved them in September so that they could alter them after the election with simple majority votes in each chamber.
Another bill would exempt employers with fewer than 50 employees from having to provide paid sick time as required under the existing law that is scheduled to take effect in March. It also would limit the amount of annual mandatory leave at larger businesses to 40 hours, instead of 72 hours, and make other changes.
Holy crap that last sentence is purely evil. In summation:
Republicans in three of the country’s most vital swing states are displaying open contempt for the most basic principle of democracy: that when you lose an election, you have to hand over power to your opponents. The national party hasn’t condemned these power grabs, giving the state legislatures tacit permission to rewrite the rules.
These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy.
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