The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Although I was born in Illinois, and lived there longer than the fourteen years I lived in Wisconsin, I consider Wisconsin my home state. It was where I grew up and attended the University of Wisconsin. All that has had a profound influence on me ever since.
Politically, Wisconsin has a long, fascinating, and dismaying history of partisan polarization. In the early twentieth century it had Senator Robert LaFollette of the Progressive Movement, when most of the country was quite conservative. In the 1950s, Alexander Wiley was the liberal chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the same time that Joe McCarthy was the ranting anti-communist ultra-conservative junior senator from the Badger State.
In recent times Senator Russ Feingold, a very liberal Democrat, teamed up with John McCain, a moderate Republican, to pass the McCain-Feingold bill. It severely limited campaign contributions. Subsequently, a Republican controlled Congress reversed some of its most important provisions. Feingold was later defeated by Ron Johnson, a very conservative-anti-Trumpist-turned-pro-Trumpist. Go figure.
Scott Walker was the infamous governor of the pre-and-early-Trump days who ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He was followed by a fairly liberal Democrat in 2018. In that election, the GOP retained control of both houses in the state assembly. Even though the Democrats garnered 53% of all the votes cast, they won only 36% of the assembly seats. That was due to deliberately unjust gerrymandering by the Republican legislature after the 2010 census. That inequity, incidentally, was upheld by the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court in a straight party-line 5-4 vote.
On April 7, the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary was held. The Democratic governor wanted it postponed, along with all the other state primaries slated for that date. The governor decreed that the election would be postponed, but the Republican-controlled state supreme court ruled that he had no authority to postpone the election, and thus it went forward by their partisan judicial ruling.
There is more to the story than just those brief facts. One of the candidates running in the primary for a supreme court seat is a Republican who currently is a member of the court. He recused himself from the vote which forced the election to be held. So instead of 5-2 to proceed with the supreme court primary on April 7, the vote was 4-2.
As in many other states, the urban areas of Wisconsin (Milwaukee and Madison being the largest two cities) are Democratic, and the rural areas are Republican. Normally many polling places are required to accommodate voters in the cities, whereas in the suburban or rural precincts, fewer electoral workers or places are needed because there are fewer voters.
I read that in the City of Milwaukee there were only six polling stations opened because of the coronavirus. Ordinarily there are thirty times that number. In other words, the Republican-dominated state supreme court knowingly prevented hundreds of thousands of votes from being cast, trusting that voters would stay home, which they did. That almost certainly will guarantee that the sitting supreme court member will be re-elected, since his voting base will be heavily rural rather than urban.
Over the past several years, the Republican Party in both national and state elections has openly attempted to prevent larger numbers of eligible voters from voting. Large turnouts traditionally favor Democrats, while smaller numbers favor Republicans. President Trump recently observed that if early voting and voting by mail is allowed, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
In the Wisconsin primary, in part because of the pandemic, thousands of citizens who requested absentee ballots were kept from receiving them. Voting by mail was forbidden altogether, again to the advantage of the Republican Party.
After a Wisconsin Democratic governor was elected in 2018, the Republican assembly brazenly curtailed his powers, knowing he could do nothing to stop them. They also knew that the state supreme court would not overturn their illegal legislative maneuvers. Similar things have happened in other states, but Wisconsin has become the momentary poster state for the erosion of democracy and the growth of autocracy.
Has Wisconsin become the bellwether for autocratic government? With similar actions being taken in other states where one political party greatly overpowers the other party, are we rapidly losing the democracy we have loudly touted since 1787? Is it being replaced with a plutocracy or oligarchy, as is happening in so many other 21st century former democracies?
President Trump has sought to assure us that the coronavirus will be well under control within a few weeks. If it should continue late into the autumn, might he then finally declare the state of emergency he thus far has failed to declare, and insist that the national election in November must be postponed? If so, wouldn’t such a decision go swiftly to the United States Supreme Court? And if so, might the Supremes, in a 5-4 party-line judicial conclusion, support the President?
On the other hand, Trump might squeak out a victory on Nov. 3 with a few million fewer votes than his opponent, as he did in 2016. Were that to happen, might he then become the absolute autocrat many people fear is an easily imaginable possibility?
But then again, if Trump loses in November, is it not likely that he would decree that millions of illegal votes were cast (as he said in 2016)? Then might he --- and Fox News --- refuse to accept the results of the election? And what then?
If the coronavirus renders our national situation far worse than anything anyone can prognosticate, it is not inconceivable that the Democrats might be swept into power with an overwhelming majority. Were that to happen, in retribution they might enact far more unjust measures than everything it took the Republicans to enact during the past two decades. After all, they have had a very painful education in how relatively easy it is for a legislative or judicial majority permanently to inflict their will on a weak minority. All politicians must continually ask themselves, “Do I really believe in democracy, or not?”
The Wisconsin presidential primary represents far more than an election which never should have happened. Potentially it raises the specter of a constitutional crisis as great as that which occurred on April 12, 1861. On that date Confederate soldiers fired on Ft. Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, and the United States of America began to experience its greatest internal crisis up to that date. Is what happened in Wisconsin on April 7, 2020 a precursor for another such crisis? - April 11, 2020
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.