Don' Trust LRB on Wisconsin Redistricting Proposal

Goya - The Caprices of War

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Just like that, in an instant, the Republican Party organs want major redistricting reform in Wisconsin?

I don't buy it. Wisconsin is at war, and it's the GOP against anyone not with the GOP and the propaganda outlets won't let the GOP down.

Reading the series of editorials in the Wisconsin State Journal on reforming redistricting maps in Wisconsin, a reader's reaction must be, it's about time. Wallpaper, that's all the calls for reform are.

Who wants gerrymandered districts, like the kind we have courtesy of the Republican Party which used technological advances in software, hired the law firm Michael Best and Friedrich LLP to draw partisan maps in secret, and made gerrymandering the worst it has ever been in Wisconsin history at tax payer expense?

All Republican legislators had agreed to a secrecy agreement and a propaganda pact on what to tell the Wisconsin people in public, after they kept the people in the dark. [See also Lawmakers were made to pledge secrecy over redistricting; Public comments were to be ignored, GOP memo shows.]

Now, many—Democrats, (not so many but at least two) Republicans, GOP newspapers—say they want redistricting reform having been converted to good government simultaneously as reform seized major political players right after the most lawless, corrupt partisan power grab in Wisconsin history.

It's a miracle.

We need the non-partisan, non-corrupt, Iowa approach to redistricting maps in Wisconsin, virtually all say. Let people decide their elected representative, and stop the politicians secretly micro-managing who the people in their district are. "Wisconsin shouldn't let legislators pick their voters," reads another GOP-leaning paper.

Redistricting proposals—Senate Bill 163 and Assembly Bill 185—call for the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) to draw the redistricting maps, instead of the political parties in the legislature.

I don't buy it. This is another con.

The Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) under the last two years of Republican corruption is no longer a reliably non-partisan agency, and the tell will come if SB 163 and AB 185 move to a vote.

This is the same party, the same Scott Walker, that took the Wisconsin Judicial Council and nakedly stacked it with GOP partisans, and now the GOP also wants to ax the rule-of-law chief justice. 

This is the same Scott Walker who withdrew an appointment of a college kid to the UW System Board of Regents when Walker found out the kid signed the Recall Walker petition. One could fill pages of GOP corruption in their short two-year reign.

You really buying the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) as non-partisan?

This is the same Legislative Reference Bureau that aware of a temporary restraining order in March 2011 decided to take orders from Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and publish Act 10, the anti-collective bargaining "bomb" Scott Walker secretly dropped on the people of Wisconsin.

Walker promptly declared the Act signed into law, and four GOP partisans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said, sure thing.

This is the same Legislative Reference Bureau that parrots the GOP's erroneous and dishonest talking points in the official Wisconsin Constitution's section on voting rights, Suffrage.

Repeatedly parrots the GOP line.

Anyone watching the GOP power grabs in Wisconsin knows fully well the Republican Party has not been suddenly transformed into a good government, reformist party. 

Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) who is chair of the Senate Committee on Elections and Urban Affairs is a reliably disingenuous Wisconsin Republican.

Lazich said in September 2013, "Granting redistricting power to an unelected, appointed board would do little to remove the redistricting process from the political realm. Rather, it would merely move the political maneuverings to an unaccountable board, beyond the reach of the electorate."

I don't pretend to know the secret machinations of the Wisconsin Republicans, and whether the GOP has everyone on board on every issue at all times, but I would bet that Lazich inadvertently made a valid point when she said of the LRB that giving it redistricting power would do little to "remove the redistricting process from the political realm."