Tuesday, March 6, 2012

GOP Legislators Trying Again To Embed Their Incumbency

That's a straight-forward headline.

The Wisconsin Assembly will pass a bill today, already approved in the Senate, to place limitations on the recall election process into the State Constitution. To become law, it would have to pass two  successive legislatures and then in a statewide referendum,.

Right now, the recall process is a tool for the electorate to correct what at least 25% of voters in an election felt was made, but the GOP, outraged at the recall aimed at Walker, and that last year took down two sitting Republican Senators, want to make the recall process more like impeachment - - for specific causes - - rather than as a political exercise of voter judgement using rights that have been on the books for a long time.

The Assembly is also to debate a bill today to remove from state law a requirement that voter registration be offered in high schools.

This is part of the GOP's broader voting suppression strategy, including approving the rigid Voter ID law and more limits on registration to trim the vote in low-income and student communities -- where Democratic voters live in large numbers.

An expert recently said the law may block more than 200,000 Wisconsin citizens from voting.

Legal push back to this fundamental attack on voting has begun with a lawsuit against the Voter ID law, and a Dane County judge ruled yesterday that the suit can move forward.

And in a separate lawsuit, a three-judge panel in US District Court in Milwaukee is reviewing the most recent Wisconsin redistricting plan, where legislative district maps were drawn up by Republicans in secret and large numbers of residents were moved to new districts where the voting power of minorities is alleged to have been illegally diluted, and where thousands of voters would miss a regularly-scheduled State Senate election.

The more they abuse the process, the faster the GOP ensures their defeat and irrelevancy.

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