NC politics might have inspired GOP playbook here, but let's be fair

It's rebalancing time here at The Political Environment.

I admit to writing some tough posts about the Wisconsin GOP's lame-duck session's laugh out loud excuses for the process and the stench of its product.

Some recent blog examples are here, and here. And maybe here. Or here, and, well, you get the point:

What Republicans are now doing in plain sight for an un-American outcome is only possible if you are saddled with power-drunk legislators without moral centers who have kept themselves firmly in place because they had earlier corrupted the redistricting process. 

And who are behaving more like Soviet-era Commissars than honest beneficiaries of decades of traditional and progressive democracy never before so openly and brazenly and intentionally abused.

Much of my criticism has been aimed at GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos because he:

Had been saying his top special session priority was passing protections for pre-existing medical conditions - - which failed;

Was being misinterpreted over remarks about restricting incoming Gov. Tony Evers' powers - - well, bull;

And had hoped the special session would yield Foxconn-style subsidies for Kimberly-Clark - - it didn't.

But it only seems fair, as Vos might put it, to 'rebalance' the blog coverage by pointing this out:

While people are saying that 2016 post-election Republican monkey-wrenching in North Carolina to hamstring an incoming Democratic Governor there presaged what got rammed through the State Capitol here this week, Wisconsin Republicans, so far as we know, drew the line at one North Carolina Republican tactic:

Tricking voters out of their absentee ballots and either throwing them away or filling them in illegally for a Republican candidate not of the ballot-holder's preference, as had been alleged.

It appears that those tactics were enabled by widespread rural poverty and unsuspecting 'volunteers' who were paid small sums of money by GOP-linked operatives.

Here Republicans were motivated by a poverty of respect for traditional democracy at the top of the political ladder, so good on the Wisconsin GOP, so far, for going low, but not that low. 

Bottom line: In North Carolina, GOP pols appear to have been paying people to steal or corrupt other people's absentee ballots.

In Wisconsin, we paid elected officials to cur back the number of weeks you could cast an in-person absentee ballot to two from as many as six.

Much cleaner.

So when you hear that the Wisconsin lame duck playbook was a North Carolina import, make sure you give the election nullifiers here credit for only similarly rebalancing a Governor's powers with the needs and concerns for the Legislature and their donors egos constituents. 

In other words, the GOP here can righteously print up bumper stickers with a PolitiFact pre-approval boast: 

"Wisconsin's GOP: We're not 100% North Carolina."