Legislature, Evers lead ’20 losers list
Nobody won 2020. It was that kind of year.
But there were some in Wisconsin politics who fared better than others.
Incumbents, for instance, were just fine for the most part. Not even a global pandemic could dislodge the vast majority of entrenched politicians in this state.
That includes Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who was elected to a fifth term running the state’s biggest city. But the rest of Milwaukee was full of change — a new county executive, a new Common Council president, a new Milwaukee County Board chairwoman, a new city attorney.
And does anybody know who the police chief is right now?
Certainly not the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, which we can all agree doesn’t have a clue. Too bad there’s not an experienced hand at City Hall who could put an end to the nonsense.
So, yes, there are winners and losers all over the Wisconsin map — and beyond — in this year we all hope soon to forget.
Winner: Wilmington, Delaware
The Democratic National Convention was supposed to be the biggest political event in Wisconsin’s history. But President-elect Joe Biden’s hometown was able to swipe the event from Milwaukee without enduring any of the intense competition and fundraising campaign.
In the end, Milwaukee got a drive-in party at the Milwaukee County Zoo parking lot with glow sticks and a big screen, while Delaware had Biden, Vice
President-elect Kamala Harris, fireworks and a national TV audience.
Are there city leaders who really think it’s a good idea to go through this process again in a bid for the 2024 convention?
Loser: State Legislature
Wisconsin lawmakers met in April to pass a coronavirus bill and didn’t work again this year — kinda like the thousands of furloughed and laid-off workers in the state.
Except the 132 members of the
Senate and Assembly got their full salaries. And then most got reelected in November.
Wispolitics.com found that we had the least active full-time state legislative body in the country since states began taking measures to combat COVID-19. A Journal Sentinel fact check reached pretty much the same conclusion.
Yet many of these pols have the gall to complain about the safety net being a so-called “hammock that lulls people into lives of dependency and complacency.” Seems the Legislature was just that in 2020 — a system that encouraged able-bodied individuals to stay at home collecting taxpayer-funded benefits rather than working.
Perhaps it’s time to take a page from Milwaukee County voters by making lawmakers part time and slashing their pay. Let’s see if that gets them off the couch.
Winner: Poll workers
These folks risked their health and lives to make sure our elections ran efficiently and effectively. Their largely anonymous work stood up to the scrutiny of the courts and a two-county recount.
A simple thank-you doesn’t seem sufficient.
Loser: Gov. Tony Evers
If nothing else, we learned this year that the first-term Democratic governor can take a punch. Because the guy was battered again and again and again by the Legislature and the state Supreme Court.
This had to be expected, in large part, because the Assembly and Senate are controlled by Republicans and conservatives hold a majority of seats on the high court. They weren’t going to let Evers get the upper hand in an election year.
Less excusable was the Evers administration’s mishandling of a backlog of unemployment claims, and the governor’s dilatory and ineffectual response to the violent protests in Kenosha and Madison. Indeed, his reaction proved as slow and stiff as the statues that were toppled late one evening on the Capitol grounds in June.
Winner: Brian Hagedorn
It’s time that both conservatives and liberals admit they had no idea what they were getting when Hagedorn won a seat on the Supreme Court in 2019.
Republicans thought they had a rocksolid justice who would bolster the court’s conservative majority. Democrats were convinced he was a “culture warrior” — the guy said it himself on his blog! — toting a right-wing agenda in his briefcase.
Both sides believed Hagedorn would be a local version of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. What they got instead was Wisconsin’s version of the much more moderate Justice John Roberts.
That became apparent when Hagedorn provided the pivotal votes to turn aside President Donald Trump’s desperate legal ploys to overturn Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Those votes earned Hagedorn, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, the ire of conservative talk radio and many others on the right, including Trump.
“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” Hagedorn said. “I’m not going to lie.”
The question now is: Can Chief Justice Patience Roggensack regain control of the court in the new year? Or is the court now effectively in Hagedorn’s hands as the swing vote in the swing state?
Loser: Big-money donors
Diane Hendricks and Dick and Liz Uihlein don’t make a lot of bad investments. That’s why they are all billionaires.
But they did this year.
The trio poured more than $70 million into helping Republicans, especially Trump in Wisconsin. But the Hendricks and Uihlein largess was not enough to keep the battleground state from flipping from red to blue.
State Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler can take some credit for Biden’s victory here. Wikler raised a record haul of nearly $60 million, much of it from millionaires around the country, including Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Down the ballot, however, those resources proved less effective. Democrats gained two seats in the Assembly, while the Republicans flipped two seats in the Senate, despite being heavily outspent.
That means GOP leaders, especially Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, will be holding most of the cards as the Legislature begins redrawing the congressional and legislative districts next year. Sound familiar?
To Be Determined: Ron Johnson
The second-term Republican senator has in some ways become the type of lawmaker he first ran against back in 2010:
The partisan political insider. No longer the anti-establishment citizen legislator, Johnson has spent the last six years running a major Senate committee, and he clearly loved it. (He loses that post in January, no matter whether the Republicans retain control of the Senate.) He has also become one of the president’s most loyal and consistent apologists — even if he isn’t always sincere.
Gone are the marmish charts detailing the federal deficit and the frequent criticism of the sitting president. In their place are congressional investigations of Hunter Biden and Senate hearings touting alternative treatments for the coronavirus.
What are we to make of Johnson 2.0?
He has certainly raised his profile nationally by standing up for Trump at most every turn, the recent votes on COVID-19 stimulus checks excepted. But it’s still not clear if the voters in Wisconsin like this version of the Oshkosh businessman.
Perhaps we’ll never find out. That’s because Johnson promised that he would retire after serving only two terms in Washington, D.C. Those two terms are now winding down, even as his potential adversaries are beginning to line up.
Will Johnson break his campaign pledge and go for a third Senate term or maybe even challenge Evers in a bid for the governor’s office?
It’s obvious what the old Ron Johnson would have done. Two and out. But the current iteration of the GOP senator? That’s TBD.