During President Obama’s last year in office, and before he was a lame duck 1, Mitch McConnell famously declared that he wouldn’t proceed with the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland because the American People should have a voice in the process. It was a load of crap, then, and amounted to an ideological refusal on the part of the Senate to do it’s Constitutional duty.
Fast forward a couple of years, and lame duck Republicans in Wisconsin suddenly don’t have a problem with telling the voice of the people to shut up. And they aren’t even being coy about their reasons for ramming through a raft of new legislation which limits the authority of incoming elected officials. Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican Majority leader in Wisconsin’s Senate, came right out and said why the legislature was being put forward,
But listen, I’m concerned. I think that Gov.-elect Evers is going to bring a liberal agenda to Wisconsin 2.
In a sane era I’d be banging my head on the wall over the glaring inconsistencies of a party that decries lame duck moves for others, while promoting it’s own lame duck moves as doing something good.
We don’t live in sane times.
The partisan rancor in the United States has reached such a fever pitch that people with whom we disagree are not considered, and cannot be considered, partners in government. They are, instead, enemies who want to destroy the country and take our freedoms. They have to be stopped, by any means necessary.
So apparent voter fraud in North Carolina, for example, isn’t a potential crime – it’s a way to keep the enemies of America out of office. And punching the voice box of Wisconsin’s voters during a lame duck session isn’t cowardly, it’s a courageous stand against them before they can get us.
This is how dictatorships come into being.
At present it is the Republicans who are ahead of the curve on the all-or-nothing partisan rancor – having been on this trajectory since Obama’s election in 2008. It is fueled by the likes of Fox News, Breitbart, and Infowars. The strategy of these mis-information is to convince people that being disagreed with is hatred, and that differences in governing philosophy actually reveal a hatred for the country. It keeps people afraid, so it will be easy to make them angry. It’s evil, and the desperate grabs for power urged on by this fear and anger are toxic to our very society 3.
We’re going bananas, and I hope we stop before it’s too late.
- The lame duck period only begins after an election. ↩
- I found the way Governor-elect was typed to be really odd. But that’s how it was in the article so I didn’t fix it. ↩
- And don’t count the progressive left out of this all-or-nothing conflict. They may be behind the curve now, but the impulse to demand ideological purity is also alive at the left end of the political spectrum. Those who don’t immediately fall in line receive the instant label of “complicit,” which no amount penance is able to remove. MSNBC and Occupy Democrats might not have the pull of their conservative counterparts, but they are catching up quick. Give them some time. Never forget, both the Democratic and Republican parties have conspired to make their organizations pseudo-official, each quieting dissenting voices in their own way. As an political independent I can say I find Democrats a heck of a lot more appealing now, but I have no illusions about the altruism of the party apparatus – it exists for itself. ↩
Painfully Hopeful 
Yeah, Wisconsin’s about to get reeeeeeeeeeeeally interesting politically speaking…
We are governed by children.
Nooooo kidding.