Thread by @benwikler

BREAKING: The Wisconsin Supreme Court just ruled against Trump's attempt to steal the election w/ a 4-3 margin.

We might not have won this case if we hadn’t defeated the Trump-backed Supreme Court judge in April.

Help us continue to organize year-round: wisdems.org/2021

Thank you to Justices Jill Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, Ann Walsh Bradley, and Brian Hagedorn for doing the right thing by your oaths to defend our Constitution!

Read the ruling.

https://twitter.com/sbauerap/status/1338540384830492673

The ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court arrived just as I pulled into the parking garage for the electoral Electoral College meeting. Wisconsin's ten electors cast our votes an hour later.

In 2020, the Electoral College is supposed to be a formality—a leftover scrap of a Constitutional compromise (driven by slavery) that formally translates the public’s votes into the mechanism for the transfer of power. This year, Trump wanted to use it to steal the election.

Wisconsin’s Electoral College votes are now cast.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has joined federal courts in rejecting Trump’s challenges. It is done.

But let’s not sweep what happened under the rug.

Wisconsinites voted in record numbers. Across race and place, across gender, we overcame barriers put in our path and cast our ballots—by mail, drop box, and in person.

We chose Biden and Harris.

And then Trump and the GOP tried to torpedo our democracy.

The GOP’s strategy was simple: throw out the ballots from the places where the most Black & brown people voted. Seek to invalidate votes in the biggest, most populous, most diverse, most Democratic cities and counties, and nowhere else. npr.org/2020/11/24/938…

In Wisconsin, the GOP sought to invalidate whole categories of ballots only in Milwaukee & Dane Counties—counties home to 74% of WI’s Black voters.

As WI Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky told Trump attorney Jim Troupis, “This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism.”

Make no mistake: this is not just a Donald Trump problem. This is a Republican Party problem.

The Republican Party and its elected leaders and lawmakers have nakedly revealed themselves to be the foes of democracy in America.

At the state party level, the GOP here told its county chairs that their strategy for the recount wasn’t to count ballots properly, but to throw them out.

The GOP issued instructions to recount observers with disenfranchisement in mind. mailchi.mp/rightwisconsin…

WI Republican state legislators have been in on this charade too. Last Friday, they held a ridiculous sham hearing, attempting to kick up dust, call it smoke, & claim that where there was smoke, there was fire. The claims of fraud were themselves a fraud. jsonline.com/story/news/pol…

Conservative WEC Commissioner Dean Knudson declared there was "no credible evidence of misconduct or wide-scale fraud.” But speakers spun threads of conspiracy theories into a blindfold to prevent supporters from seeing what’s in front of them: A clear Biden victory.

As always in the GOP’s nationwide campaign to overturn the election results, the targets in Wisconsin were the votes in counties where the most Black and brown people live.

And as always, their lies and insinuations didn’t survive even the barest scrutiny.

The Republican Party. GOP state legislators. And oh yes—Republicans in Congress. Ron Johnson, aka @TheWorstSenator, told a former Republican chair that he knows Trump lost--but essentially admitted he doesn’t have the political courage to say so publicly.
thebulwark.com/my-call-with-r…

They’ve twisted themselves into a pretzel. They gave Trump a pass because they wanted to ride his coattails into power.

Now he’s lost power over the government—but he still has power over them. He can torch their careers. And they care about their careers more than America.

None of it will work. Biden and Harris will take the oaths of office on January 20, 2021. The people’s voice will be heard.

And then we’ll proceed to the real work—to end this COVID pandemic, to put people back to work, to renew the long and urgent work of addressing our crisis of racism and racial inequality, to getting kids back in school, curbing the climate crisis—and so much else.