Tax dollars to protect GOP power
Wisconsin’s leading purveyors of secret government — the Republican leadership in the state Assembly and Senate — pushed through a plan Thursday that gives highpriced lawyers carte blanche at taxpayer expense to fight a federal court ruling requiring the GOP to redraw legislative maps they secretly gerrymandered in 2011.
These people really have no shame.
With legal bills already in excess of $2 million, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald led the effort to fund a high-powered legal operation in an attempt to roll back the decision of a panel of three federal judges, which last fall found that the maps Republicans drew six years ago were so favorable to the GOP that they violated the voting rights of Democrats. In December, federal judges ordered the Republicans to redraw the maps by November.
State Attorney General Brad Schimel has said he plans to appeal the federal court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Vos and Fitzgerald, who control the Legislature, are hiring the lawyers to write friend-of-the-court briefs to buttress Schimel’s offensive.
If Vos and Fitzgerald cared about the citizens they pretend to serve, they would end this farce.
But when it comes to this issue — the once-every-10years redrawing of district boundaries — Vos and Fitzgerald are only serving themselves and their party. This is all about power.
Working in secret, Republicans used sophisticated computer software in 2011 to lock in electoral advantage.
The result: GOP candidates in 2012 state Assembly races actually got 168,000 fewer votes than their Democratic counterparts, but the GOP still scored 60 of 99 seats. Now, they hold a 64-35 advantage in the Assembly and a 20-13 advantage in the state Senate.
The lawyers who Vos and Fitzgerald apparently want to use don’t come cheap. But no matter: It’s Wisconsin taxpayers who will foot the bill.
The Journal Sentinel’s Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Republicans would like to hire Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm of former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement. Clement himself charges more than $1,300 an hour, although it’s not clear that he would be on the legal team. A second firm that may be hired is Bell Giftos St. John. That firm is based in Madison; its partners charge, on average, $825 an hour, according to a review by the National Law Journal.
The plan gives Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Vos (R-Rochester) the power to hire any other firms they think could help their cause. So far, state taxpayers have spent $2.1 million in legal fees related to redistricting.
As in the past, legislators were hoping Thursday that the public wouldn’t notice what they were up to. As Marley and Stein report:
Neither the Senate Organization Committee nor the Assembly Organization Committee posted meetings that were to occur Thursday on the Legislature’s website, as is the usual practice. The Assembly committee alerted reporters to the meeting on Wednesday; the only public notice of the Senate committee’s plans was posted on a single bulletin board.
Just as in July of 2015 when the Legislature’s budget-writing committee tried to secretly gut the state open records law, citizens of Wisconsin must demand that this latest end around be stopped. We only recently found out, through great reporting by the Journal Sentinel’s Dan Egan, that at the same time legislators tried to gut the open records law, they also used the budget-writing process to quietly make it easier to use eminent domain to condemn private property for the benefit of a Canadian oil pipeline company.
These legislators are NOT looking out for the citizens’ best interest.
They are only looking out for their own.