Save the Republic

 Responsible Conservatives Step Up to Save the Republic

 

The battle for the heart and soul of the Republican party is getting more heated. Sensible conservatives are starting to condemn the authoritarian former president and his followers as the true threat to our democratic Republic. 

 

In a joint, open letter published on Wednesday by the conservative magazine The Bulwark and the liberal New Republic, writers and pundits from across the political spectrum came out with a specific list of policies implemented by followers of the former president which they all agree are inimical to the survival of our democratic Republic.

 

Here is the list, verbatim,

 

“We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to change state election laws to limit voter participation.

 

“We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to empower state legislatures to override duly appointed election officials and interfere with the proper certification of election results, thereby substituting their own political preferences for those expressed by citizens at the polls.

 

“We vigorously oppose the relentless and unending promotion of unprofessional and phony “election audits” that waste public money, jeopardize public electoral data and voting machines, and generate paranoia about the legitimacy of elections.

 

“We urge the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass effective, national legislation to protect the vote and our elections, and, if necessary to override the Senate filibuster rule.

 

“And we urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.”

 

The letter concludes, “[n]ow is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.”

 

Wisconsin and Washington County GOP leadership have embraced all the policies opposed in the letter and need to be replaced by those who support our democratic republic form of government. 

 

There are decent conservatives in our state and community who are appalled by the actions of the former president and his followers, especially with the conduct of the former president after he lost the last election and of his followers who stormed the Capitol to overturn the result of the election on January 6^th. Some congressional Republicans are also speaking out against the former president and what he represents.

 

There are decent conservatives who support our system of open and fair elections and want to secure the vote for all eligible citizens. 

 

There are decent conservatives who support fairly drawn legislative districts which are competitive and more responsive to the will of the voters. 

 

It is time for those conservatives who support the rule of law and our democracy to step up and retake control of the Republican Party in our country, state and county. 

 

If that happens, hopefully, we will return to a political debate about ideas and policies that move the country, state and county forward instead of the current culture wars that do nothing but divide us and stoke hatred. 

 

Locally, the first place where we need to tone down the rhetoric is with our local school boards. Well heeled Republican mega-donors are funding the Mequon-Thiensville school board recall movement over health and safety policies implemented by the current board. Other Wisconsin school board meetings have become heated battlegrounds over mask and vaccine policies and inclusive curricula where the real motivating factor is frustration over a vanishing way of life and privilege.

 

Responsible people need to take back the conservative movement and the GOP to move back to governing in a spirit of compromise and collegiality. If they don’t act, our democracy is in peril. 

Shut Down the Big Lie

 Shut Down the Big Lie

 

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R - Pleasant Prairie) visited with the former president this Summer and came back home to start a completely partisan “audit” of the 2020 presidential election. He earmarked over $676,000.00 of your hard-earned tax dollars for the effort and appointed former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to head it up.

 

Clearly, the former president is thriving on a continuation of the “Big Lie” that the past election was “stolen” and that he is the only legitimate occupant of the White House. Equally clear is that adoption and continued spread of the “Big Lie” is a condition precedent for any conservative politician who wants the former president’s endorsement in upcoming elections.  Vos was only too happy to continue the fight and his election “audit” is proof of his fealty to the lost cause. 

 

Gableman’s appointment to lead the effort gave Vos further alt-right credibility. Gableman ran for the Court as a staunch conservative and continued his far-right march after leaving the Court. He has deep ties to the Republican party and its major donors. Before he was selected by Vos, Gableman made numerous public statements that the 2020 election was “stolen” without ever citing any supporting evidence. 

 

After his appointment, Gableman continued to show his true colors with his hires for investigator and legal positions. He choose people who already expressed belief in the “Big Lie” or worked in the former president’s administration seeking to overturn the election loss. 

 

Gableman and Vos issued subpoenas to election officials and mayors in Wisconsin’s largest cities and the state’s Election Commission requiring them to produce documents and sit for interviews in Gableman’s office in a private building next to a liposuction clinic. Gableman’s emails to other government officials have come from a Gmail account, not a secure governmental email address. His office announced that the mayors would not have to sit for interviews if they produced the requested documents. Gableman almost immediately said the mayors would have to honor the subpoenas and sit for the interviews, contradicting his own staff. Most of the documents Gableman seeks are already in the public domain.

 

After the Arizona “cyber-ninja” election audit failed to produce any credible evidence to support the “Big Lie,” Gableman sought cover by claiming his investigation was not seeking to overturn the last election, just to make sure everything was done properly. 

 

Gableman has not helped his cause in the court of public opinion with admissions that he really does not know how elections work in Wisconsin. His credibility as an election watchdog took another hit with recent revelations that he did not actually vote in seven elections in the past three years. He shows his ignorance of the electoral process by focusing his requests on data in voting machines which do not store data. 

 

Gableman dug more holes in his effort by consulting with the “MyPillow” pitchman, Mike Lindell, who has made repeated claims, without supporting evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen and hacked by the Chinese. Another Gableman consultant has claimed that votes were shaved off the presidential election totals, again without offering any proof to support his claims. 

 

Finally, as news reporters began asking the tough questions, Gableman attacked the news outlets, comparing them to German Nazi propaganda efforts by anti-Semitic zealot Joseph Goebbels who was responsible for the worst atrocities against Jews in Europe before and during World War II. 

 

All the evidence in the public domain and the results of numerous lawsuits here and in other states clearly shows that the last presidential election was fair and free from undue influence or corruption. Joe Biden won the election in Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes and more than 7 million votes nationwide. The “Big Lie” is just that, a whopper. 

 

Governor Evers correctly noted the Vos/Gableman “investigation” is a sham and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul has called on Vos to shut it down as a boondoggle and waste of taxpayer dollars. 

 

Newspapers and other media outlets around Wisconsin are calling on Vos to end the farce and wasteful spending. 

 

There are a lot better ways to spend 676,000 than sending a biased and partisan former judge to look for something that does not exist. It is time for our elected representatives to focus on what Wisconsin needs, better roads, fully funded public schools, acceptance of increased Medicaid funding, COVID mask and vaccine mandates, protection of the environment and an end to the culture wars.

 

Contact your representatives and senators in Madison and demand they shut this craziness down.

 

Orange Shirt Day

 Orange Shirt Day

Part of Teaching History

 

This past Thursday, September 30^th, was Orange Shirt Day.

 

Orange Shirt Day originated in Canada and has spread to the United States. It is known formally as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and was designed to educate and raise awareness of the Indian residential school systems in Canada and the U.S. along with their impact on Indigenous communities for over 100 years. 

 

In the 1800s, governments in both countries sought to absorb indigenous peoples into their majority societies by creating residential schools which took native children from their families to wipe out their heritage, language, and values by teaching Native children Anglo-European language and culture. Native names were changed to sound more like the names of White children and the use of native languages was forbidden. Native spiritual traditions were ignored and supplanted by Anglo European religious practices and holidays. 

 

The schools were largely funded by the governments and run by religious groups, mainly Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian. Only recently have some of these groups apologized for their roles in this inhumane activity.

 

The separation of children from their parents was mandatory and enforced by law enforcement agents who seized the children and brought them to the schools. Parents had to get a “pass” from the agent on their reservation to visit with their children. 

 

The schools were underfunded and diseases like tuberculosis were rampant. Many children were sexually abused and died at these schools. The recent revelation of thousands of unmarked graves at former school sites has increased scrutiny and condemnation of the past practices. 

 

Even though these schools and their practices were condemned starting in the 1920s, it took a long time for the schools to be closed. The last one in Canada was closed in 1996.

 

Orange Shirt Day was started in 2013 by a residential school survivor in Canada, Phyllis Jack Webstad. She recounted being taken from her family at the age of six to a residential school where she was stripped of her clothes, including the new orange shirt given to her by her grandmother. It was never returned. The Orange Shirt now symbolizes the identities stripped from Native children by the schools. 

 

To try and atone for these wrongs, the Canadian government made September 30^th a national holiday. It recognizes the day on which the children were rounded up and taken to the residential schools. Canadians put together educational programs and television shows to recount the horrors of these practices, hoping to ensure they are not repeated. Canadian commissions were formed to study the past events and come up with strategies to honor First Nation tribes and their members. 

 

Indigenous peoples’ history in the United States has not been recognized as well as it has been in Canada. Our residential schools were just as bad as those to the North. We have not done anything substantial to rectify the wrongs perpetrated in them.

 

The United States government was even more ruthless in carrying out the Indian Wars in our Western territories, massacring millions of people while relocating the survivors to reservations that remain to this day. We still ignore treaties made with tribes when they conflict with things like mines, pipelines, harvesting of fish and rice, and wolf hunts. Tribal efforts to protect the environment for all of us are mostly ignored or rejected. 

 

We can learn from our Northern neighbors that teaching the true history of past wrongs helps heal the wounds those wrongs caused. Reconciliation can only come with an honest self-appraisal of past misdeeds and atrocities.

 

Our elected representatives in Madison seem not to have figured this out. Our state Assembly, with all our local representatives in support, recently passed a bill banning the teaching of the history and impact of our systemic racism in Wisconsin public schools. As if this will forever hide those transgressions of the past from seeing the light of day. Of course, passage of the bill is merely symbolic of the culture wars that make up the current GOP agenda. It will never survive a Governor Evers’ veto. 

 

We need to confront our real history, including our complicity in the selling of human slaves, to make sure it never happens again. Just claiming that racism is done, does not make it go away.  We also need to recognize and rectify our abysmal history when it comes to how we dealt with those who were already living here when our westward expansion sacrificed their way of life. 

 

Maybe that can start with the elimination, once and for all, of the use of Native mascots and names for cities, towns, villages, public schools, and sports teams.