Thread. #Wisconsin story. @jessieopie live-tweeted Gov. Walker’s announcement that he would sign all the legislation in the #WisconsinPowerGrab, & reaction from Governor-elect @Tony4WI. A couple of thoughts...
2. First, I don’t know how anyone who had lived in Wisconsin watching its politics over the last decade could have been surprised Walker approved what the legislature sent him. It is probable he was consulted extensively long before the legislature acted.
3. Scott Walker & Republican legislators in Wisconsin are served by the same campaign infrastructure, and serve the same large donors. They can disagree about some things, but must always be assumed to be of one mind on anything related to funding campaigns & winning elections.
4. Note in the thread by @jessieopie one provision of the #WisconsinPowerGrab legislation Walker singled out for special praise: an income tax cut, offsetting increased sales tax revenue resulting from a court ruling about online sales. Online sales taxes will be paid...
5...by everyone who buys goods online; most of the income tax cut will go to people in the highest state income tax brackets. It’s a parting gift by Walker and his Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature to their largest donors.
6. The other thought, though, concerns something Walker is right about: Wisconsin remains a strong-Governor state. Governors here have more authority than their counterparts in most other states, including detailed line-item veto power.
7. The #WisconsinPowerGrab was absolutely intended to repudiate voters’ decision to replace Walker with @Tony4WI, but could only actually do this to a certain point. Evers may have legal recourse against some of its provisions, particularly those restricting early voting.
8. But a couple of the other provisions, like a restriction on withdrawing Wisconsin from the latest bogus suit against Obamacare, are less than they seem. Moreover, the package as a whole papers over a key weakness in Republicans’ political position here.
9. Walker & other Republicans run as the advocates for a coalition of large donors, heavily white suburbs around Milwaukee, and rural Wisconsin against largely African-American Milwaukee, & Dane County, home of the Capitol in Madison and much of the state’s economic growth.
10. Resentment is a big component of Republican campaign appeals — including an increasing amount of explicit racial resentment more typical of states in the Deep South. But resentment only goes so far; Republicans can’t really do much for rural Wisconsin or even...
11...Milwaukee’s suburbs. They can still serve their largest donors, and will always fight ferociously to keep Republican legislators on the government gravy train. But even Republican-leaning voters in outstate Wisconsin don’t care so much about that.
12. As #Badgers football fans sometimes have to be reminded, Wisconsin isn’t Alabama. That’s a good thing. The seething racial resentment that powers a permanently conservative political establishment in Deep South states isn’t absent here, but isn’t as widespread or deeply felt
13. This means, I think, that public support for donor-driven Republicans using southern states as a political model has hit its ceiling. A governor like @Tony4WI — as non-divisive a personality as there is in politics — should be able to make inroads in rural Wisconsin....
14...while retaining Democratic support in Milwaukee & Madison. The #WisconsinPowerGrab was a desecration of Wisconsin’s political traditions, and a setback for @Tony4WI and the Democrats — but not a fatal one or anything close to it. [end]
