America is almost four weeks into the voting stage of the Republican presidential race. The candidates are debating. The media is covering the competition 24/7, and in such minute detail that Rick Perry’s quitting of the contest was treated as news. And Republicans in three states have caucused and voted in numbers that party leaders, pundits and the talk-radio amen corner tell us are significant.
Yet at the same time, those same party leaders, pundits and radio talkers continue to dismiss the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as a false construct with little real hope of prevailing.
Fair enough, let’s compare.
Since January 3, Republican caucuses have been held in Iowa (with an electorate of 2,231,589), and Republican primaries have been held in New Hampshire (electorate of 998,799) and South Carolina (electorate of 3,385,224).
That adds up to a total electorate of 6,615,612 in the trio of first- (and second- and third-) in-the-nation states.
Turnout for the Iowa caucuses is now pegged at 121,479. Turnout in the New Hampshire primary was 248,448. Turnout in the South Carolina primary was 601,166.
That adds up to a total turnout of 971,093, or about 14.5 percent of the possible voters in the three states.
And what of Wisconsin?
The state has an electorate of 4,170,501.
The United Wisconsin petition drive to recall anti-labor Governor Scott Walker collected significantly more than 1 million signatures.
Rounding to a million, that’s about 23.9 percent of the possible voters in the state.
So here’s what we know:
1. If you add up all the caucus and primary votes that have been cast so far for Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, the former Rick Perry, the former Jon Huntsman, the former Michele Bachmann and the eternal Buddy Roemer, they still have not attracted as much support as has the drive to recall Scott Walker.
2. If you compare the percentage of the electorate in the three caucus and primary states that has expressed support for all the Republicans who would be president, it is dramatically lower than the percentage of the Wisconsin electorate that wants to recall Scott Walker.
3. If you add the total number of names on petitions filed January 17 to recall other Republicans in Wisconsin—Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald and three of Fitzgerald’s colleagues—the total number of signatures filed in support of the recall of Walker and his cronies is close to 1,940,000. That figure is just about double the number of votes cast in all the Republican presidential contests for all the Republican presidential candidates so far this year.
Conclusion: if the Republican presidential race is a serious endeavor, the Wisconsin drive to recall Scott Walker, Rebecca Kleefisch, Scott Fitzgerald and their compatriots is doubly serious. And far, far more popular with the available electorate.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 28, 2012
January 30, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP Presidential Candidates, Wisconsin Recall | Iowa, New Hampshire, Politics, Republicans, Scott Walker, South Carolina, United Wisconsin, Wisconsin |
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While Rick Perry campaigned in South Carolina Thursday, criticizing Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain while bragging about his own pro-business record, another controversial conservative governor was hanging out in Texas: Scott Walker. The Wisconsin governor, who sparked a firestorm last spring with his effort to eliminate collective-bargaining rights for state employees, keynoted a lunch at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual legislative orientation, held at the Hilton Hotel. Outside, a large crowd protested with signs supporting the effort to recall the polarizing Wisconsin chief executive.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)—a think tank with a clear and aggressive policy agenda of slashing government until it’s all but nonexistent—is a dominant player in Texas conservative politics. While the Texas Legislature won’t meet until next year, TPPF’s annual policy orientation is nonetheless a gathering of many big names in Texas politics, and its panels often help set the conservative agenda. Not surprisingly, the group ferociously defends Perry’s record in Texas, arguing that the Texas model is the one every state might emulate. Walker was there to tell them just how much he agreed. But not before a Russian-doll-like series of introductions set the stage for him.
“If America is where the world turns for liberty, Texas is where America turns,” began Brooke Rollins, the president and CEO of TPPF. Then came Wendy Gramm, the wife of former Senator Phil Gramm, Ronald Reagan’s favorite economist, and a woman now perhaps best known for sitting on Enron’s board during its scandal. She currently chairs TPPF’s board of directors. She was introducing Steve Moore, the former head of the Club for Growth.
In case Walker’s appearance didn’t already have enough gravitas, Moore decided to offer some scale. He explained that Walker is “a hero of our movement” for having taken on “the evil empire of the public employees’ unions.” “I have very rarely seen such a profile in courage,” Moore told the crowd.
When Walker finally walked on stage, the room of conservative policymakers gave him a standing ovation just for showing up. You might say it was a friendly crowd.
The thing is, though, that none of Walker’s actions sound particularly revolutionary in Texas. The Wisconsin governor outlined his policy approach—tort reform, lowering taxes, and dismantling union power—to a crowd that lives in a right-to-work state with low taxes and few regulations. Walker hardly needed to explain why raising taxes wasn’t an option. For most Texas Republicans, to do so would be heretical. While Wisconsin protests against Walker were bringing that state to a standstill last year, Perry signed a budget slashing state services, including a more-than 10 percent cut in education funding, and it’s still unclear whether there will be any political ramifications. In a state where Republicans have won every statewide race for over a decade, the thing Texas conservatives are sometimes missing is an enemy.
Walker, on the other hand, isn’t lacking for foes. Walker’s war stories about dealing with protesters and fighting against the Wisconsin teachers’ unions captivated his audience. “Collective bargaining is not a right,” he told the cheering crowd. “Collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement, and it’s time we stood up and put the power back in the hands of the taxpayers!”
“The reason I became the number-one target of 2012 public employees’ union is because I took away their money,” he went on, later noting that after his policies took effect, one union fired 42 percent of its staff. The crowd chortled at that. Walker noted that he would almost undoubtedly face a recall election this summer and that the opposition had more intensity and enthusiasm than the taxpayers he’d been protecting.
When Rollins came back on stage to thank the governor, she seemed enchanted. Walker’s story, she said, reminded her of Ronald Reagan’s speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. She read selections from Reagan’s speech that detailed the courage of Marines, and explained that “the courage and the incredible heart that it takes to do the right thing is something that is missing from the public square.”
She then noted that she was “not comparing the AFL-CIO to Germans.”
That didn’t stop the crowd from giving Walker his second standing ovation.
January 15, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Public Employees, Unions | Conservatives, GOP, Politics, Scott Walker, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Wisconsin |
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A recall of controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker now appear inevitable. In just 28 days, activists collected 507,533 signatures. Organizers have until January 17 to collect 540,208 signatures, which is equal to 25% of the state’s 2010 general election turnout. To be safe, recall advocates have set a new goal of 720,277 signatures by the deadline.
The recall efforts success has propted the Scott Walker’s campaign to take aggressive action to invalidate signatures. Walker sued his own Government Accountability Board, arguing the proceedures adopted by the board to review signatures aren’t agressive enough. Without citing any concrete evidence, Walker alleged to Fox News that there was massive fraud in the signature gathering effort. The case is still pending.
Nevertheless, Walker has changed his tone in recent days and acknowleged making mistakes in pursuing his an anti-union effort in his first few days in office. Walker told the LaCross Tribune that “that he’s made mistakes in how he’s gone about achieving his agenda” and “he regretted not having done a better job of selling his changes to state government.” Walker also said he regretted his statements on a phone call with a man pretending to be billionaire David Koch. He said his comments on the call, where he referred to his plan to undermine collective bargaining as “dropping a bomb” and admitted he considered planting troublemakers among the protesters, were “stupid.”
Assuming the final signatures are collected and verified, a recall election is expected in the late-Spring or Summer.
By: Judd Legum, Think Progress, December 31, 2011
January 2, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Democracy, GOP | Koch Brothers, Politics, Republicans, Scott Walker, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Recall |
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Over the past six months, someone—or a group of someones—has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund an effort to change the rules of the 2012 presidential election to make it very difficult for President Barack Obama to win reelection. But the shadowy lobbying group mounting this campaign hasn’t disclosed its donors—and under current law, it doesn’t have to.
In two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP legislators have introduced bills that would change how electoral votes—a candidate needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency—are awarded in a presidential election. Under the current system, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the electoral votes from that state.
If the Republican plan becomes law in either Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those states would change how electoral votes are awarded. The new plan would allot electoral votes on the basis of vote totals within congressional districts. If a candidate wins a congressional district, he or she would receive one electoral college vote. Whoever does best in the statewide race would receive two electoral votes.
Because Republicans will draw the boundaries of the congressional districts in both states, the new rules would mean that Obama could win the states but still receive fewer electoral votes than his Republican opponent. Should a Republican split the states’ electoral votes with Obama (even if Obama draws more votes), that could provide the GOPer with the margin of victory in a close race. (Under the US Constitution, it is up to the states to allot electoral votes as they see fit.)
In Pennsylvania, a secretive nonprofit group called All Votes Matter has been pushing the electoral vote scheme since May. All Votes Matter has close ties to the Pennsylvania GOP—it hired a number of former top state Senate staffers-turned-lobbyists. “It was pretty much the Senate GOP All Star Lobbying Team and [former state House Democratic Counsel Bill] Sloane,” Peter DeCoursey, the bureau chief for Capitolwire, a newswire that’s read religiously by Harrisburg insiders, explained in September.
Between April and June, the group spent $77,700 to lobby state officials to support legislation to implement this scheme. By early September, GOP Gov. Tom Corbett and the state House and Senate leaders, Mike Turzai and Dominic Pileggi, both Republicans, had all expressed their support for the idea. It was “the best $77,700 anyone ever spent on potential legislation,” DeCoursey wrote. “The entire state governing wing [was] for a bill that [hadn’t] been introduced yet.”
A week later, though, the landscape had changed significantly. Mother Jones and other national media outlets drew widespread attention to the story, and the state GOP chairman and the vast majority of its congressional delegation came out against the plan.
All Votes Matter wasn’t fazed. It kept lobbying. Charles Gerow, a spokesman for All Votes Matter, told DeCoursey that the group had raised $300,000—and already spent $180,000. But Gerow wouldn’t tell reporters where the money was coming from, saying only that “civic-minded citizens” had provided the dough. This week, the group filed new lobbying disclosure forms revealing that it spent $186,882 on lobbying between July and September.
All Votes Matter doesn’t disclose its donors “as a matter of policy, per the request of many of them,” Gerow told Mother Jones. “It’s their legal right not to have it disclosed, and they don’t want it disclosed so they’re not subject to media calls and other potential harassment,” he added. All Votes Matter has “fully and completely complied with the law and will continue to do so,” Gerow said, and “if those who don’t agree with the law want to change it, it certainly is their right to do that.”
There’s no law that says All Votes Matter has to disclose where its money comes from. But opponents of the electoral college changes are outraged that voters are being kept in the dark about who’s behind such a potentially consequential reform. “This is an effort to fundamentally change the way Pennsylvania conducts its presidential elections, in my view to rig the election,” says Democratic state Sen. Daylin Leach. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days. We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.”
Carolyn Fiddler, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which assists Democrats in state-level races around the country, says: “Given the potential impact of this measure this group is lobbying for, not just for Pennsylvanians but for presidential politics and Americans in general, the public has a right to know who’s behind it.”
Transparency advocates say it’s not enough to just know who is doing the lobbying—voters should also know who is paying the bills. “The old adage is that actions speak louder than words, and deeper pockets allow for more action,” says Michael Beckel, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “Without disclosure, the public is unable to fully hold accountable the companies and organizations that have hired these lobbyists in the first place.”
In Wisconsin, it’s even less clear who’s behind the electoral college shenanigans. The Wisconsin Democratic party has alleged that the bill there, sponsored by GOP state Rep. Dan LeMahieu, was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, among others. But so far, the Dems haven’t been able to produce any evidence to back up their charge, and emails from LeMahieu’s office Mother Jones obtained via an open records request showed no evidence of any outside involvement in the drafting of the law.
Democratic state legislators are worried that the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin bills are part of a broader effort. If GOP legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states where Democrats typically win presidential elections pass the electoral college changes All Votes Matter is proposing, it would mean “the end of competitive presidential elections and certainly people’s confidence that the process is fair,” Leach maintains. “To think that some secret group somewhere is rubbing their hands together and putting millions of dollars into this effort—and we can’t even know who they are—I think that’s obscene.”
By: Nick Baumann, Mother Jones, November 2, 2011
November 3, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP, Voters | Democracy, Election 2012, Electoral College, Pennsylvania, Politics, Republicans, Wisconsin |
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Republican efforts to inoculate themselves against recall hit a snag Monday when a moderate Republican announced his opposition to a plan that would permit recalls to happen in newly-drawn partisan districts.
Senator Mary Lazich introduced two bills on Friday that opponents say will rig recall elections in favor of Republicans. Democrats plan to start collecting signatures on November 15 to recall Governor Scott Walker, as well as state Senators who voted in favor of collective bargaining limits. Lazich’s bills are the latest in a series of moves by Wisconsin Republicans to change the recall election rules in their favor.
Redistricting and Recalls
One of the Lazich bills would have required that recalls be conducted in the new legislative boundaries re-drawn in this year’s partisan redistricting process. The law enacting the redistricting map says the new boundaries are not to take effect until November 2012, and the state elections board had determined the recall elections would take place in the old districts.
Lazich’s bill would overturn the election board’s determination and make the new maps effective next week, making a recall more difficult by putting GOP Senators in the much safer districts they created for themselves earlier this year. It would also put the maps into effect before two legal challenges to the new boundaries were resolved.
According to Jay Heck of Common Cause Wisconsin, holding recall elections along the new boundaries would be “terribly confusing,” with “voters unsure about whether they are eligible to vote in their district, which could deter voters from turning out.”
It also would have put some voters into the position of recalling a Senator they never elected in the first place, and preventing other voters from recalling the Senator that they put in office.
“I’m not going to vote for [Lazich’s bill] because the people who sent me to Madison are the ones who should decide whether I ought to be recalled or not,” said Senator Dale Schultz (R-Richmond Center). “I’m not interested in further adding confusion by changing the rules.”
With Republicans holding only a one-vote Senate majority, Schultz’ vote against Lazich’s bill means that it will not pass (assuming all Democrats oppose it). Senate Republicans held a 19-14 majority until recall elections this summer removed two Republicans from office, narrowing the GOP majority to 17-16. In March, Schultz voted against Governor Walker’s controversial Act 10 limiting collective bargaining rights, but under the Senate makeup at the time, his opposition was not enough to keep the bill from becoming law.
For some, the fact that extreme Republican bills can no longer be steamrolled through the legislature is proof that last summer’s recall elections were effective.
Notary Requirement for Recall Petitions
Another Lazich proposal introduced Friday and originally scheduled for a vote Tuesday (but delayed until Wednesday) would add an additional layer of process by requiring that each page of recall petitions be notarized. Organizers need over 540,000 signatures to recall Walker, and with up to ten signatures per page, more than 54,000 pages will need notarization. Lazich said the bill would bring “a little more accountability” for recall signature gatherers, but Common Cause’s Heck says the bill “assumes Wisconsin citizens are dishonest” and is intended “to result in fewer recall signatures.”
Scot Ross of the liberal One Wisconsin Now says of the last-minute bill that “if Mary Lazich thought recall signature notarization was such an issue, she had the last 20 years of her undistinguished career as a state legislator to do something about it,” pointing out that Lazich did not introduce bills to change recall election rules when Republicans threatened to recall former Democratic Governor Jim Doyle or Democratic U.S. Senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold.
Additionally, the notary bill may be unconstitutional. Article XIII, Section 12 of the Wisconsin Constitution deals with recalls, and sub-section (7) states:
Laws may be enacted to facilitate its operation but no law shall be enacted to hamper, restrict or impair the right of recall.
Other Recall Rigging
These bills are part of a larger GOP effort to control the way elections and recalls are conducted.
Lazich, a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), also introduced the ALEC-inspired voter ID legislation that will make it significantly more difficult for students, people of color, and the elderly to vote in Wisconsin.
In late September, Republican lawmakers announced they would give Governor Walker authority to reverse two elections policies developed by the non-partisan Government Accountability Board.
One policy would have allowed voters to access a form online, print their recall petition, sign it, then send it to the group coordinating recalls. It would have made it easier for those collecting recall petitions because the groups would not have to gather the signatures face-to-face and door-to-door.
The other would have permitted universities to put stickers on student ID cards that could then be used for voting. Wisconsin’s new voter ID law permits the use of student IDs for voting, but only if the ID includes certain information not currently on any of the student IDs issued in the state. The sticker would have allowed student IDs to meet the necessary criteria, and made it easier for students to participate in recall votes.
The Republican-led Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, led by ALEC member Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Rep. Jim Ott (R-Mequon), told the Board these matters should not have been adopted as “policies,” but instead as administrative rules, which require the approval of Governor Walker. Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) told Republicans that, by giving Walker veto power over the rules that govern his recall, “you have given the governor control of the chicken coop.”
The elections board backed down in response to pressure from Republicans, leading to accusations the non-partisan board had become politicized.
Even without these efforts, Governor Walker and state Republicans already have an advantage in the recall elections. A loophole in campaign law allows for unlimited funding and spending during the recall signature-gathering period. These additional efforts by the GOP to change election rules in their favor suggest that Walker and his party are taking the recall threat seriously.
By: Brendan Fischer, Center For Media and Democracy, November 2, 2011
November 3, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining | Mary Lazich, News, Politics, Republicans, Scott Walker, We Are Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Recall |
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