If a pedestrian were killed by a speeding car at an unmarked intersection, the neighborhood would demand an action plan from elected officials to make sure the tragedy was never repeated.
So if child on a bicycle were killed by another reckless motorist at the same intersection a few weeks later, the municipality would quickly act and install four-way stop signs.
And should a mom and her baby be run over and killed at the same spot a few days or weeks later, local leaders would overnight get traffic signals up and running there and have them controlled by traffic cops for the morning rush hour to stop the carnage - and avoid being run out of office.
Yet somehow, the GOP-run Wisconsin Legislature has managed to escape those kinds of base-level, do-something expectations and accountability during an historically-horrible calamity.
And GOP leaders on Tuesday after months of intentional inaction were still displaying a callously detached and breezy nonchalance -
"We do not have specific drafted proposals because our intention was to sit down with the governor and actually talk about our ideas,” [WI GOP Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos said.
- in the face of unprecedented suffering statewide from which countless citizens, families, businesses - and the public's confidence in government - may never recover.
And the more I think about that last casualty - the public's loss of confidence in government - the more I think that is precisely what the GOP Legislative leadership set out to accomplish.
Because if you have been preaching for decades that government is the problem - and even the enemy - then you can 'prove' your case by making sure that government - especially when you can make sure a first-term Democrat in the Governor's office does not get the chance to do what's needed when only the government when coordinated can bring to the battle the requisite energy and resources to get the job done.
Imagine if Gov. Evers' 'Safer-at-Home' order and the rest of his pandemic-busting agenda had been allowed to continue to tamp down the virus, and, along with it, Republican propaganda and monkey-wrenching that has relentlessly disrespected Evers, demonized public employees and degraded the public sphere.
You can track the impact of the Wisconsin Legislature's more than seven-month-long failure to convene and act - other than its litigating and general undermining during the pandemic's still-escalating rampage using these dates, data points and official COVID19 reports:
* Last day the Wisconsin State Assembly met: April 14.
Cumulative number of COVID19 cases reported by that date in Wisconsin, 3,555; number of cumulative COVID19 deaths, 170. The data are from the State health department COVID19 website.
* Last day the Wisconsin State Senate met: April 15.
Cumulative number of COVID19 cases reported by that date, 3,721; cumulative number of cumulative COVID19 deaths, 182. Data from the State health department COVID19 website.
Latest State health department cumulative number of cases reported on its COVID19 website on November 17th, 323,846; deaths 2,741 - including a record one-day death toll of 92.
So the COVID19 deaths during the GOP-run Legislature's do-nothing-but-litigate-and-obstruct recess have increased 15-to-16 times and the positive case total has increased about 90 times.
More, here, via Twitter:
