The Wisconsin Elections [Sic] Commission said "no" today to the legal request for a hand-recount of ballots cast in the November 8th Presidential election - - the same careful, focused type of recount which actually discovered that the wrong candidate, Republican Norm Coleman, had been declared the winner of a US Senate seat in Minnesota that was won by Democrat Al Franken.
Here's the Wisconsin ruling:
It is not a surprise that the commission is ruling out the hand recount sought by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and supported by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, because the GOP's candidate narrowly won the state's electoral votes, and Wisconsin is run as a one-party state by an autocratic legislature in league with an imperial Governor and State Supreme Court that sacrificed its impartiality when it had a 4-3 conservative majority that has now risen to an even harder-edged 5-2 right tilt..
The commission is the partisan replacement election and campaign referee created by Republican legislators and signed into law by GOP Governor Scott Walker because the predecessor body, the non-partisan nationally-acclaimed Wisconsin Accountability Board, had provided staff support for Grand Jury-like "John Doe" investigations into allegations of campaign finance law violations which ensnared Walker and several GOP-linked advocacy groups.
The Accountability Board wipeout was part of a Walker/GOP legislative assault on clean government protections that included legalizing candidate/outside financing coordination which had been probed in the "John Doe" investigations, banning the use of John Doe investigations into allegations of political corruption, and loosening campaign donation limits to bring more special interest funding into state campaigns:
All of which will help GOP maintain its enormous legislative majorities that feed Walker the bills he wants, and which will find rubber-stamped approvals in the 5-2 rightwing-ruled State Supreme Court where conservative justices share business and ideologically-driven donor groups with Walker and his legislative majorities.
Note also that this is the same legislature routinely obeisant to the divide-and-conquer Walker and his agenda-setting donors whose gerrymandering, crafted in secrecy, was such an extreme attack on basic democratic government that a panel of the Circuit of the US Appeals Court in Chicago just ruled 2-1 that the district maps had been drawn illegally to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
The 'chamber of commerce mentality' Walker installed atop the Department of Natural Resources that has steered rule-making and policy direction towards privatizing state land, water access and clean air enforcement has the same source and intention as the one-party, anti-democratic, corporately-directed GOP rule that has also trashed a century of civil service in the state, obstructed ballot box access, slashed the UW budget and long-standing tenure system, starved K-12 public school financing, and suppressed wages by wiping out public sector collective bargaining, further discouraged unionization in private-sector workplaces through 'right-to-work' legislation and has frozen the minimum wage at a rock-bottom, poverty-enforcing $7.25-per hour.
In short, Wisconsin is less a democratic state in the traditional citizen-involved/shared-power sense and more an arm of the business community which, again, has wish lists awaiting what are really foregone conclusions.
Esquire's online columnist Charles P. Pierce routinely puts it this way:
Here's the Wisconsin ruling:
Elections commission rejects request for hand recount
It is not a surprise that the commission is ruling out the hand recount sought by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and supported by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, because the GOP's candidate narrowly won the state's electoral votes, and Wisconsin is run as a one-party state by an autocratic legislature in league with an imperial Governor and State Supreme Court that sacrificed its impartiality when it had a 4-3 conservative majority that has now risen to an even harder-edged 5-2 right tilt..
The commission is the partisan replacement election and campaign referee created by Republican legislators and signed into law by GOP Governor Scott Walker because the predecessor body, the non-partisan nationally-acclaimed Wisconsin Accountability Board, had provided staff support for Grand Jury-like "John Doe" investigations into allegations of campaign finance law violations which ensnared Walker and several GOP-linked advocacy groups.
The Accountability Board wipeout was part of a Walker/GOP legislative assault on clean government protections that included legalizing candidate/outside financing coordination which had been probed in the "John Doe" investigations, banning the use of John Doe investigations into allegations of political corruption, and loosening campaign donation limits to bring more special interest funding into state campaigns:
Gov. Scott Walker has cemented key changes in time for the 2016 political campaign, signing into law bills giving campaign finance law its biggest makeover in decades and dismantling and replacing Wisconsin’s oversight board for elections and elected officials.
Walker’s signing of the two bills, announced in a press release, was conducted in private Wednesday. It was widely expected after the bills passed the Legislature last month on votes that largely mirrored party lines.
Note also that this is the same legislature routinely obeisant to the divide-and-conquer Walker and his agenda-setting donors whose gerrymandering, crafted in secrecy, was such an extreme attack on basic democratic government that a panel of the Circuit of the US Appeals Court in Chicago just ruled 2-1 that the district maps had been drawn illegally to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
The 'chamber of commerce mentality' Walker installed atop the Department of Natural Resources that has steered rule-making and policy direction towards privatizing state land, water access and clean air enforcement has the same source and intention as the one-party, anti-democratic, corporately-directed GOP rule that has also trashed a century of civil service in the state, obstructed ballot box access, slashed the UW budget and long-standing tenure system, starved K-12 public school financing, and suppressed wages by wiping out public sector collective bargaining, further discouraged unionization in private-sector workplaces through 'right-to-work' legislation and has frozen the minimum wage at a rock-bottom, poverty-enforcing $7.25-per hour.
In short, Wisconsin is less a democratic state in the traditional citizen-involved/shared-power sense and more an arm of the business community which, again, has wish lists awaiting what are really foregone conclusions.
Esquire's online columnist Charles P. Pierce routinely puts it this way:
,,,Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to run their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin...Case closed.