Walker's embrace of secrecy & stealth are fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-Wisconsin

All signs point to Walker signing most if not all of the secretly-crafted 141-page elevation of legislative power awarded to Republican legislators at the expense of the Governorship from which voters ejected him.

Fitting, isn't it, that the legislators who drafted the proposals they camouflaged as "reasonable" were themselves installed in districts they gerrymandered through maps secretly-drafted behind the closed doors of private attorneys off the State Capitol grounds.

Where, from their artificially-safe legislative seats, and with taxpayer dollars paying both their salaries and their gerrymandering-legal specialists' fees, these GOP legislators awarded privilege after perk after newly-amplified power onto Walker.

Who, you must remember, had ascended to the Governor's office in 2010 with the help of partisan operatives stashed on the public payroll in the Milwaukee County Executive's Office and who could communicate with each other and GOP campaigns through a secretly-installed and operated Internet router in then-County Executive Walker's office suite.

Walker has loved the stealth move, whether dropping the Act 10 bomb on public employees in the early days of his first term, or since his defeat on November 6th by welcoming the final closed-door work of his legislative henchman and delivering a series of sucker punches to incoming Democratic officials chosen by a majority of voters.

Woody Guthrie said some people rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen. And now with late-night, lame-duck, taxpayer-paid law-writing, papered over with a wafer-thin veneer of democratic 'process' rammed through the people's house. 

When lawmakers become lawbreakers. There's a new Wisconsin Idea, which replaces for now the old one Walker tried once to stealthily kill. I guess the second time's the charm. 

It takes an especially perverse figure operating in a democratic environment based on openness and respect for established rules to select secrecy and stealth as his default behaviors.

I don't think we yet know all the reasons why Walker would sabotage any shot at a legacy by attacking the voting majority.

Could be that he doesn't care, could be that everyone he owes called in their markers, could be that he needs this one last power high to mask for the next few weeks any inkling of doubt that can come creeping around the back door.

Along with that rising sense of mediocrity that a cocksure incumbent would feel in his gut when exposed as a loser in an election upset. 

By one of those Act 10 teacher-types Walker thought he'd stamped out.

Or, could be that when all's said and done, the ad copy writers have gone home,  the photography air brushes have been put away and the band has stopped playing that Walker is still that nasty bad loser Milwaukee first saw 30 years ago.

The one with the fragile ego, inflated sense of his own value and even back then was incapable of taking responsibility for a loss at the polls.

The one whose response to losing the Marquette campus newspaper 1988 endorsement for Student Body President over his rule-breaking campaign  - - before he went on to lose that election - - was the tossing away of as many copies of the paper carrying the endorsement pullback that his supporters could grab. 

Details below:

Here's how the Marquette Tribune described that election:

His sophomore year, Walker ran for president of the Associated Students of Marquette University (ASMU, the former title for Marquette Student Government). He was accused of violating campaign guidelines on multiple occasions.

The Tribune reported then that he was found guilty of illegal campaigning two weeks before his candidacy became official. Later, a Walker campaign worker was seen placing brochures under doors at the YMCA. Door-to-door campaigning was strictly prohibited.

Walker initially denied this but later admitted to the violation, which resulted in lost campaign privileges at the YMCA.

In the run-up to election day, the Tribune’s editorial board endorsed Walker’s opponent John Quigley, but said either candidate had the potential to serve effectively.

However, the Tribune revised its editorial the following day, calling Walker “unfit for presidency.” The column cited Walker’s distribution of a mudslinging brochure about Quigley that featured statements such as “constantly shouting about fighting the administration” and “trying to lead several ineffective protests of his own.”

The revision also expressed disappointment in Walker’s campaign workers reportedly throwing away issues of the Tribune after the endorsement was initially made.

Walker dismissed this, saying he had no knowledge of what his supporters did, according to a Tribune article from February 25, 1988.

Bur we do know that Kremlin-style plotting and double-dealing by wannabe Commissars-cum-Wisconsin Republican office holders is something new and foreign and repellent to the Wisconsin of Gaylord Nelson, and to moderate Republicans like businessman and Milwaukee civic icon Sheldon Lubar who minced no words in an open letter Tuesday to Walker & Co.

"I am not proud to read in the Milwaukee newspapers and learn the conniving that Wisconsin Republicans, led by you and certain others, are planning," Lubar wrote.

Let's hope that when Walker departs the scene there's a democratic rebound led by a mass movement too disgusted to ever allow a Walker 2.0 - - and which dedicates itself right now to turning the 2020 elections into Vos and Fitzgerald defeats that make Walker's margin look insignificant.