Thread by @folkbum

1/ Today, the #Wisconsin Republican legislature proposed eliminating the Constitutional offices of State Superintendent, Secretary of State, & Treasurer. What follows is a longish 🧵 I've meant to write for some time, addressing the utter contempt today's @wisgop has for voters.

2/ What sparks it is this piece of flaming-hot horseshit from @shaesortwell, from the @jsonline story today by @mollybeck: jsonline.com/story/news/pol…

3/ The short version of the thread is, the GOP has spent a decade doing things like weakening SoState, Treasurer, and Superintendent. Then Sortwell has the gall to use the lack of responsibility and authority those officers have as a reason to amend the constitution.

4/ Let's start in 2010. We didn't know this at the time, but @scottwalker, then running for governor, had his campaign illegally coordinating with outside groups in clear contravention of state law as it existed then. theguardian.com/us-news/ng-int…

5/ The so-called "tea party" movement was also peaking, fueled by many of the same big-money donors that funded Walker's campaign and outside allies. time.com/secret-origins…

6/ These big-money groups were furiously whipping up public sentiment against government and, specifically, President Obama, because Obama had the nerve to raise their taxes as part of the Obamacare pay-fors.

7/ But there was also money to be made at the state level, and that's what those funding and coordinating with Walker were after. In particular, Eric O'Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth were all-in for Walker. sourcewatch.org/index.php/Eric…

8/ (O'Keefe did not stop there; he went after GOPer Mike Ellis when Ellis had the nerve to oppose some pieces of Scott Walker's--really, O'Keefe's--agenda. prwatch.org/news/2015/01/1…)

9/ Walker was, of course, elected in 2010, as was a GOP majority in the state Assembly and Senate. Realizing this might be temporary--Dems held the trifecta themselves at the time--the GOP set about immediately entrenching their own power against those pesky voters.

10/ Act 10 is the most infamous of the 2011 GOP moves: It strategically crippled the most effect opponent Wisconsin had to the GOP's campaign machine, the state teachers' union. It also hit other public employee unions--except those that supported Walker. americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy…

11/ To be clear: The GOP was coordinating (illegally) with massive outside spenders for their campaigns, a huge advantage, and basically silenced the voices of the opposition, creating a huge power imbalance in who could most effectively get information in front of voters.

12/ At the same time, the GOP radically changed the state's congressional and legislative district maps, ensuring that even if anti-GOP messaging got through to voters, the votes didn't really matter. A safe majority of GOP seats became voter-proof. jsonline.com/story/news/pol…

13/ (Yes, subscription needed for the above, but SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM.) Wisconsin is very, very gerrymandered. urbanmilwaukee.com/2015/08/06/mur…

14/ Having secured majorities for themselves, the Wisconsin GOP then set about doing things to limit the ability of anyone *not* part of the legislative majority from making any policy at all for the state.

15/ This included stripping power away from the Secretary of State and the State Treasurer. They even got a measure eliminating the office of treasurer entirely on the ballot for voters in 2018. madison.com/wsj/news/local…

16/ But along the way, the GOP got caught coordinating with these outside groups--illegally, I say again. It started with a "John Doe" investigation of some fishy stuff in Walker's office while he was Milwaukee County Executive. ballotpedia.org/John_Doe_inves…

17/ As the investigation continued, the Milwaukee County DA uncovered not just evidence that Walker's staff was cheating veterans' charities and soliciting minors for sex in an unmarked van (all true!), but also ...

18/ ... that Walker installed secret routers in his office to avoid having many of his communications subject to open-records laws, and to allow gubernatorial campaign coordination literally in his County office during work time. archive.jsonline.com/news/statepoli…

19/ Walker was caught red-handed doing three illegal things. 1, violating Wisconsin campaign finance law, which prohibited coordinating with groups like O'Keefe's WCfG; 2, violating other campaign laws by campaigning from his office; and 3, breaking open-records law.

20/ The upshot of this is several levels of ridiculous. First, the GOP-led legislature changed the campaign finance law that Walker broke, so that he could keep coordinating in the future without breaking the law. archive.jsonline.com/news/statepoli…

21/ They also eliminated the state's Government Accountability Board, which was non-partisan and which had come down on Walker's campaign. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin…

22/ They replaced it with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a 3-Democrat, 3-Republican body guaranteed to deadlock on anything controversial and thus let bad actors get away with, well, acting bad.

23/ And the Wisconsin Supreme Court--whose conservative members had been elected with help from O'Keefe and WCfG but refused to recuse themselves--ruled that the campaign finance law Walker broke was unconstitutional. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…

24/ THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT ALL. But the @wisgop legislature did not stop there. There was still the threat that someone, somewhere in state government whoo was not a Republican legislator might have some influence over state policy.

25/ To deal with this threat, they created a process that as far as I know has no analog in any other state in the union: The Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules. ballotpedia.org/Review_of_Admi…

26/ This is the committee that killed Wisconsin's mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic by claiming that the state's Department of Health Services, despite having statutory authority to deal with health crises, had to go through JCRAR to do it. weau.com/2021/08/03/law…

27/ The real target of the JCRAR was Tony Evers, now @GovEvers but then elected State Superintendent at the Department of Public Instruction. Evers is a moderate Democrat. But that he was a Democrat at all rankled the GOP who thought they should hold all the levers of power.

28/ Evers said he wouldn't submit to JCRAR, as he was a constitutionally-elected state officer. The legislature's allies, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, sued. The GOP also denied Evers representation of his choice in the suit, because pettiness. wsaa.org/?p=10204

29/ Evers ultimately lost the suit (thanks again to a conservative state Supreme Court). So now every department of government is basically held to the whim of one man, Steve Nass. All of government runs through him. news.ballotpedia.org/2019/06/26/wis…

30/ (Ex-governor Tommy Thompson had the good sense to tell Nass to fuck off. That was fun. wisconsin.edu/news/archive/u…)

31/ BUT WAIT. When Evers beat Walker in 2018--and Dem Josh Kaul was elected attorney general--the GOP leg passed and Walker signed the infamous lame-duck laws, stripping gov & AG of many of the powers Republicans in those offices had exercised freely! wpr.org/wisconsin-legi…

32/32 And that is the long story of how the Wisconsin GOP cemented control of the whole damn state, not just into the hands of one party, but really into the hands of just a few powerful legislators who are free to do the bidding of wealthy donors without fear of voter reprisal.