Republican lawmakers are declining to spend $15 million to upgrade computer system for unemployment insurance

As I recently wrote, Wisconsin's GOP leaders are running a pain and suffering operation out of the State Capitol that deliberately keeps low-income and disadvantaged citizens trapped in poverty, bad health and powerlessness.

These GOP legislators collected full pay and benefits while taking most of 2020 off, yet have recently voted against food aid, school funding and broadened health care coverage for the poor.

And given their self-serving and taxpayer-financed-and-gerrymandered privilege and power, the Legislature will be run by Republicans with this rancid partisan arrogance for the foreseeable future.

As I'd said, "it's a disgrace."

The text of my previous post about this is below:

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You really need a scorecard - and a strong stomach - to track the deliberate actions that WI GOP legislators have recently taken which knowingly inflict pain and suffering on state citizens, especially those with the least resources to fight back.

* Wisconsin's GOP legislative leaders sent all members home for most of 2020 with full salary and benefits without legislatively-confronting the COVID19 crisis, fought the Governor's emergency health orders, forced voters to cast ballots at polling stations while the airborne virus was surging, and were willing to trade a ten-fold increase in positive COVID cases for ending masking orders.

All that and more is documented here.

* Then they sloppily cancelled $70 million a month in federally-provide emergency food aid for low-income residents and those who had lost jobs to the crisis.

The life-or-death funding was restored by the Governor and Federal Government, not the GOP legislators who created the problem and the anxieties that went with it.

* Earlier this week the same GOP leaders refused again without debate to accept federally-funded health care insurance coverage for 91,000 state citizens, including some working in a state where Republicans have kept the minimum wage frozen at $7.25/hr. - but earn just enough above the federally-defined poverty level and do not quality for the state's Medicaid program.

The funding would have saved state taxpayers $1.6 billion dollars the GOP leaders are willing to plug in to cover some of what the sacrificed federal money would have financed, but that's how our state's fake conservatives roll.

GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos continues to block federally-funded expanded health care coverage for 91,000 low-income residents.

A Wisconsin physician explained what turning aside the federal funding would mean to her low-income patients:

Dr. Ann Helms, a neurologist in Brookfield, treats patients with strokes.
“So I see patients when they have no choice but to go to the hospital. The number of patients I have saying, ‘You have to discharge me, I can’t afford this. I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Dr. Helms. “They end up with catastrophic medical bills and are never able to work again. So they end up on permanent disability. Whereas, if we had been able to cover $5 of antihypertensive and a visit to the doctor twice a year, they’d be able to still be working.”

* And on Thursday the state GOP Death Cult's leadership cut so much money from the Governor's proposed school aid budget, and played so many rule-breaking games with it, that another $1.5 billion in federally-provided COVID funding for schools is now imperiled.

Republican leaders know these decisions put people's health, jobs, futures and lives at risk - even as COVID19 still infects and kills state citizens - yet our taxpayer-paid public 'servants' do not care.

They only care about remaining in gerrymandered-protected, benefit-laden and do-little-to-nothing legislative seats-

The Wisconsin Legislature has been the least active full-time state legislative body in the country since states began taking measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, a WisPolitics.com review finds.

- from which they are working on a single agenda: diminishing Gov. Evers and defeating him in a 2022 election they are busy rigging in their favor with a raft of new voting suppression laws.

It's a disgrace.