Small-town lawmakers to remake WI big cities' police/fire boards

Continuing their willful abandonment of local control principles and practices to enforce an ideologically-driven dominion over Wisconsin's big cities, the GOP-led Wisconsin Legislature with its lopsided rural, smaller-town and suburban majorities has decided to dictate changes to the structure and operations of Madison and Milwaukee's law enforcement oversight commissions.

Imagine if this situation were reversed: we'd be hearing calls from Republican communities to secede and affiliate with Iowa or Michigan.

But this Big Government intrusion from the State Capitol into traditionally local operations is the very kind of heavy-handed meddling that happens when one party gerrymanders itself into more-or-less permanent control of lawmaking, policy agendas, Legislative district boundaries and state spending.

The Republican-controlled Senate is scheduled Tuesday to adopt Senate Bill 117 to change how police and fire commissions in the state’s two largest cities — Milwaukee and Madison — operate....

[Milwaukee Mayor Tom] Barrett called the bill a "direct assault" on local control. He criticized it for allowing people who live outside Milwaukee to sit on the city's commission. 

"This is the farthest thing from reform you can imagine. This is not police reform. This is pure and simple state interference in local matters driven by the police association," he said. 

For the record, the State Senate's new GOP Majority leader after Scott Fitzgerald was promoted to a safely-gerrymandered seat in the Congress is Devin LaMahieu, from Oostburg, pop. 3,077.

While habitual power grabber and State Assembly GOP Speaker Robin Vos -

2018 photo

- is from Burlington, pop. 10,956 - and both of these leaders' communities have white populations of 95% or more.

Yet these are the political leaders who have positioned themselves to make quality of life decisions in what now passes for normal across the Bizarro world of Wisconsin politics statewide and for 5.82 million citizens.

Note that Milwaukee is a 'donor' municipality' to the state treasury - and no doubt fast-growing Madison and Dane County are, too - though thanks these days to punitive penny-pinching, the state sends back smaller and smaller sums to the bigger donor communities.

While Walker slandered Milwaukee despite its subsidization of the very sort of smaller community where he launched his dog-whistling smear, and the GOP-dominated Legislature and continues to aggregate to itself more and more power over the state's heavily-minority, urban populations