Thursday, February 13, 2020

Vos continues game-playing over leading, legislating

The GOP-led Wisconsin Assembly is like the monopoly cable provider which screws up your service, intentionally ignores a simple repair and then tells you the fix you didn't order includes pay channels you don't want - - and a land line you didn't ask for, either.

This is Speaker Robin Vos's method, too: playing self-serving, party-enriching games rather than performing straight-forward public service.
Robin Vos speaks at Racine Tea Party event (8378614585).jpg
His latest partisanship-over-policy charade: moving a bill that purportedly would prevent another backlog of untested rape evidence kits like the one created by Brad Schimel, the GOP's defeated State Attorney General.

But rather than simply give Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul the basic procedural tools needed to make sure there will not be another mess like the which Schimel's sloth left behind, Vos's bill throws in some GOP hot-button school choice and immigration items designed to provoke a veto from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers - - no doubt to produce distorted GOP campaign copy later this year designed to put Evers in a negative light.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul has been pushing legislation laying out kit protocols for a year.  
He alleges Republicans know the immigration and choice provisions are non-starters with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers but attached them anyway as a means of killing the legislation.
We've seen this Vos tactic before.

Remember when Vos denied Democratic State Rep. Jimmy Anderson the right to easy telephonic participation in certain meetings - - Anderson had suffered paralyzing injuries in a severe car crash - - so Vos's eventual 'solution' to a problem of his own making was...a grudging Assembly rule change which Vos allowed.

It somewhat accommodated Anderson (and Anderson's constituents), but also turned what should have been a simple change into a package of Assembly rule changes that gave incumbent Vos's GOP majority new privileges in other matters, such as additional opportunities to override gubernatorial vetoes.

In other words, Anderson's dilemma was used by Vos and his party to gain partisan advantage and boost GOP leverage against Gov. Evers.

Which cheapened what should have been a simple and humane resolution and degraded the democracy which Vos and his party - - just like their GOP counterparts in Washington - - are devaluing in Wisconsin on a daily basis.






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