Wisconsin Attorney General Refuses to Defend Constitutional Law Enforcement Officers

Wisconsin Attorney General
refuses to defend Constitutional
law enforcement officers

As the Republican Party works to stop the bipartisan John Doe investigation looking into possible issue ad coordination between the Scott Walker campaign, (and likely Wisconsin state senate campaigns), and numerous groups that ran issue ads in the 2012 recall elections, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa ruled that "[Wisconsin] regulations and statutes" do not apply to the groups subpoenaed in the investigation, thus no John Doe probe may continue.

Randa's is an absurdly activist and corrupt decision, heavily criticized among jurists.

Randa has stepped in the middle of a law enforcement investigation conducted by Wisconsin constitutional officers (district attorneys, Article VI, section 4) who are empowered by Wisconsin statutes to conduct John Doe probes in specific circumstances.

Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen should be attempting to intervene in Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel document) and defend Wisconsin constitutional officers in their criminal justice investigation.

The fact that Van Hollen is sitting this case out speaks to the fact that Van Hollen feels his duty is to the Republican Party of Wisconsin and not the people and Constitution of Wisconsin.

When Van Hollen feels his party is threatened by litigation, Van Hollen's Department of Justice (DoJ) has no hesitation constructing any argument no matter the effect on the rights of Wisconsin citizens, if the DoJ would prevail.

Consider Van Hollen's effort to try to stay the injunction against Wisconsin's photo voter ID law, Act 23, designed to obstruct Wisconsin voters (Frank v. Walker; League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin v. Deininger).

Writes Van Hollen and the Wisconsin DoJ in a May 2014 motion to keep the GOP-crafted voter ID operative for the next election: “‘[A]ny time a State is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people, it suffers a form of  irreparable injury’” [Maryland v. King, ___ U.S. ___, 133 S. Ct. 1, 3 (2012)] (other citations omitted).

If Van Hollen truly feels this way, why is he not blasting away at Judge Randa in court and in the press?

Civil Rights Org Calls for Voting Rights Bill

Civil rights activists held a press conference by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights this morning, calling for a Committee hearing, debate, markup and passing of the Voting Rights Act Amendment (VRAA), HR 3899.

The VRAA is meant to repair the damage wrought by the five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby v. Holder.

No voting rights activist likes the bill. They pretend to like to the bill.

No speaker today dared mention the anti-voting rights provisions in the Voting Rights Act Amendment.

HR 3899, among other provisions, contains language that would protect states' photo voter ID laws, a clause inserted by its chief sponsor Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-White People) who refers to his home state's (Wisconsin) photo voter ID law as "common sense."

Wisconsin's voter ID law was struck down last month by a federal judge who found that up to 300,000 voters lacked voter ID; Latinos and African Americans would are unfairly burdened by the law and prevented from voting, that voter fraud does not exist in Wisconsin and that the law is in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.

This is Sensenbrenner's conception of a "common sense" law.

Sensenbrenner was caught on camera in February saying, "I hope the president vetoes the bill. If the president vetoes—well, let me rephrase that – if the president vetoes this bill (VRAA), he will lose an awful lot of the African-American support that he has." (Roth, TRMS)

So we have the so-called fix to the VRA protecting state voter obstruction laws that the VRA was originally enacted in 1965 to stop, and the co-author of the bill, Sensenbrenner, who is a demonstrated phony voting rights advocate.

Progressive congressional supporters say they can amend the bill though they are afraid to publically express their opposition to the anti-voting provisions in the bill because this would offend Republicans who would then not allow the bill to be debated, amended or would vote against it, while Republicans continue their work against voting rights.

If this legislative strategy does not appear to make any sense, this is because the strategy is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Wisconsin DAs Call out Judge Ruldoph Randa: Open John Doe Records

Update III: Wisconsin Public Radio has updated their story, and confirmed that the story is inaccurate with a link to Judge Randa's proposed order: "CORRECTION: "Wisconsin Public Radio reported this morning that Judge Rudolph Randa had issued a ruling in the John Doe lawsuit ordering nearly all documents in the case to be released to the public. It was a proposed order, not a final order, and has not been signed by Judge Randa.We regret the error."

Update II: Wisconsin John Doe attorneys have filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to reauthorize their authority over the John Doe investigation, and are seeking an order preventing U.S. District Judge Ruldoph Randa from taking further action on this law enforcement investigation while it proceeds, Patrick Marley reports.

Update: Wisconsin Public Radio report is inaccurate; and is retracted . Judge Ruldoph Randa ordered the release of more than 100 documents, reports Wisconsin Public Radio. Randa orders that four documents stay sealed because the Wisconsin Club for Growth says their secrecy is needed to secure their First Amendment rights. See update above.

Judge Ruldoph Randa likely is not aware how ridiculous his rulings shutting down the John Doe investigation are.

No one has been charged; no one has gone on trial; the Wisconsin John Doe statute calls for determining these two questions.

But Randa decided it is for him as a federal judge to decide a First Amendment objection during an ongoing state law enforcement investigation.

Worth noting is that no one is targeted before he or she is charged in Wisconsin John Doe probes, despite what readers are told by GOP flacks.

Rightwingers including Judge Randa have complained about the secrecy codicils allowed under Wisconsin's John Doe statute, in Randa's order to shut down a law enforcement investigation.

In Randa's opinion, Randa writes, "the first John Doe developed into a long-running investigation of all things Walker-related," (p.4) a foolish reference to the apparent orderly, bipartisan probe overseen by a presiding judge.

Randa displays his naked bias often in his opinion Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al (Case No.  14-C-139), filed May 5, making several references about the "secret" nature of the John Doe probe subpoenas, though secrecy in John Doe probes is typical

In the face of rightwing accusations of "police-state" (George Will) targeting of the Scott Walker campaign and rightwingers, prosecutors yesterday made a motion to open the records, per the John Doe statute.

"Subject to s. 971.23, [Discovery and Inspection] if the proceeding is secret, the record of the proceeding and the testimony taken shall not be open to inspection by anyone except the district attorney unless it is used by the prosecution at the preliminary hearing or the trial of the accused and then only to the extent that it is so used," reads the John Doe statute.

The presiding judge has the discretion to ultimately determine if the record is to be made public.

Previously, the Wisconsin Club for Growth had made a call for discovery.

Report Dan Bice and Patrick Marley:

In a surprise move, prosecutors said Wednesday they support opening hundreds of pages of documents from a John Doe probe into fundraising and spending by Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and its conservative allies during recent recall elections. ...

State Reserve Judge Gregory Peterson, who is supervising the probe, filed a one-page response saying he neither supported nor opposed the effort to unseal the documents the journalism groups are seeking.

Randa who has injected himself into the case in a heavily criticized decision and order, is now the deciding authority on if and what records will be released.

Randa's authority may be short-lived, however, as an appeal filed by the five Wisconsin district attorneys, the presiding John Doe judge, and the special prosecutor, a self-identified Republican, Francis Schmitz is still to be decided.

If Randa is to reclaim a shred of credibility, he should order full transparency of the John Doe records, per the District Attorneys' discretion in keeping with state law.

Unless Randa is prepared to declare the Wisconsin John Doe statute unconstitutional on whatever contrived grounds he can imagine [ludicrous but this is Randa], the people of Wisconsin and the litigants will be served by transparency in this case in which Randa should never have made his sweeping decision he ordered on May 5, and his finding of frivolousness by the district attorneys two days later.

Attorneys Samuel Leib, who is representing Milwaukee DA John Chisholm, said: "(Randa's) decision threatens the constitutional authority of every district attorney and the attorney general of the state of Wisconsin." (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Yes, the constitutional authority is endangered and one wonder why Wisconsin's governor and attorney general are not intervening on the basis of these concerns.

Sure, Scott Walker's campaign is likely implicated in illegal coordination in violation of Wisconsin campaign finance law, but Walker did take an oath to defend the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions, and so did J.B. Van Hollen.

Book Review: The Federal Prosecutor, An American Horror Story

Licensed to Lie by former Assistant
United States Attorney and Chief of
of the Appellate Section for the
Western and Northern Districts of Texas,
U.S. Department of Justice

At no time in modern American legal history has this book been needed as urgently.

"Overcriminalization is a dangerous trend that should alarm everyone. With over 4,450 crimes scattered throughout the federal code, and hundreds of thousands more hidden in federal regulations, “doing the right thing” just isn’t enough to keep you on the right side of the law. Every day people can become overcriminalization victims in a heartbeat and the consequences can be devastating," notes the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In Sidney Powell's Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (Brown Books Publishing Group, 2014) the villain is the United States Department of Justice and a host of federal judges.

In tales rivaling legal thrillers by John Grisham, Ms. Powell cogently lays out stories of death, and corruption plaguing the DoJ in this non-fiction account of the betrayal of America.

The stories are familiar to us as recent history—the Enron collapse and the wrongful prosecution of a beloved U.S. Senator—but what we think we know is turned on its head.

With this work, the former federal prosecutor and appellate attorney Ms. Powell stands among the great whistleblowers in modern American history as she exposes the injustices and inhumanities perpetrated by the self-aggrandizing members of two federal DoJ Task Forces, who had a license to lie and destroy innocent lives.

Many jurists already know of Sidney Powell's brilliance and dedication, and Licensed to Lie should be required reading for every high school political science class, every undergraduate college constitutional law class and is a must-read for any American with a passing interest in freedom.

No one reading this work—with a jaw-dropping foreword written by Judge Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—can do so without being appalled.

Ms. Powell working in various capacities in defense of the innocent faced down prosecutors acting as a veritable Star Chamber in some instances, aided by an oppressive judiciary, unyielding and obtuse.

Powell names the names, and tells the facts, and nothing in the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) ought to be the same after this story is told of criminal justice as an American horror story.

Lawful duties of federal prosecutors such as the disclosure of exculpatory information to the defense (the Brady Rule), were abandoned in the quest to secure criminal convictions of innocent people.

In roughly the same timeframe as the Enron Task Force, DoJ prosecutors from the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of Main Justice targeted U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska; 1968-2009) in a prosecution so contrived, the presiding federal judge, Emmet Sullivan, ordered a special prosecutor empaneled to investigate the prosecution.

The DoJ PIN in this period operated an ongoing investigation into alleged public corruption in Alaska, nicknamed Polar PEN, begun in 2004.

Sidney Powell chronicles the criminal prosecutions and miscarriage of justice committed by Polar PEN, resulting in at least one suicide, the unlawful and wrongful 2008 conviction (later set aside at the request of Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009) of World War II hero and Senator Ted Stevens in a repulsive tableau of prosecutorial misconduct.

"I wondered how much the Enron Task Force had collaborated with the Polar Pen prosecutors and  who had concocted all of these overly creative cases without crimes as bogus 'honest services' allegations. The prosecutors had obviously cross-pollinated to produce baseless crimes and tortured law in both major investigations. The Enron Task Force cabal had about a two-year head start on Polar PEN, but the investigators and prosecutions overlapped for several years," writes Powell. (pp. 238-239)

Similar cases of prosecutorial torture of federal statute occurred in the contemporaneous U.S. Attorneys scandal as the creative employment of the Honest Services statute was used by unscrupulous U.S. attorneys such as Steven Biskupic.

Honest services. This is an ironic statute used by prosecutors who have no conception of honesty and even less regard for public service.

We can be grateful to Judge Richard Posner, of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for writing an important opinion this last January (Fields v. Wharrie, 2014) establishing the right of the wrongfully convicted to sue corrupt prosecutors, who in Posner's opinion, no longer enjoy the absolute immunity used by prosecutors as a license to lie.

Every prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence, as demonstrated by Powell, should face a civil action.

Powell's appellate brief on Honest Services devastated the DoJ's use of its myriad honest services prosecutions, but Powell’s work is about the innocent and the prosecutors, guilty of betrayal.

Someone should write about Sidney Powell, the advocate from the south who just blew the lid off the hidden history of the judiciary and the American prosecutor.

(A longer version of this review appeared here in April 2014.)

Wisconsin Attorney General Is Just Another GOP Hack

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is again using his office in service to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, instead of the people of Wisconsin.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Yesterday, Van Hollen appealed Wisconsin Federal District Judge Lynn Adelman's order and opinion finding Wisconsin photo voter ID law violates the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The appeal will heard by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Van Hollen could refuse to defend the unconstitutional law that after a November 2013 trial that showed that Wisconsin Act 23 could disenfranchise as many as 300,000 Wisconsin voters, among them minorities, the elderly, disaffected veterans, students, technical college students and those who have recently moved their residences.

Newspapers, some of which are GOP-leaning in their editorial pages, have urged Van Hollen to stop wasting money and time defending a law intended to make it more difficult for Wisconsin citizens to vote, in furtherance of the careers of Republican Party officeholders.

Van Hollen's decision comes as no surprise as he vowed to appeal in early May, nor does Scott Walker, James Sensenbrenner and the Republican Party's tenacious pursuit and abiding support of blocking Wisconsin voters from voting.

It bears repeating that in 2008 Van Hollen tried to use the Help America Vote Act to suppress Democratically leaning voters to stave off landslide defeat for the McCain-Palin ticket of which Van Hollen served as co-chair.

In 2008, WisPolitics uncovered an audio recording revealing Van Hollen promising such action on during the Republican National Convention held in St. Paul, Minnesota, after multiple conversations with Reince Priebus, then Wisconsin GOP party chairman, after Van Hollen denied holding secret conversations on the suit with Republican officials.

"(T)here was no discussion with anybody involved in leadership with the Republican Party (or the McCain campaign) about this (voting rule) lawsuit before it was brought," Van Hollen said.

WisPolitics blew that lie out of the water after uncovering audio of Van Hollen talking with the Republican leadership promising legal action in a corruption of his office.

Though Republicans often contend that state photo voter ID laws have been found constitutional in Crawford vs. Marion County Elections Board (2008) by the U.S. Supreme Court, Earnest A. Canning knocked down this contention in his piece from early May in the Brad Blog.

Canning's analysis is required reading for anyone reporting on the GOP voter obstruction and photo voter ID laws.

Writes Canning:

In 2006, Indiana Republicans enacted the first such polling place Photo ID law in the nation. That case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Crawford vs. Marion County Elections Board (2008), before it was allowed to be enforced by the state.

 

The Court's ruling in the case, however, was far different from how Republican defenders of such laws have portrayed it ever since, including Texas Attorney General (and Gubernatorial candidate) Greg Abbot, who falsely claimed last year, in response to the U.S. Dept. of Justice's lawsuit against his state's similar law, that "The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that voter ID laws do not suppress legal votes." In fact, the Court did no such thing.

 

As this site, and numerous others, have repeatedly noted, Crawford involved the allegation that Indiana's first-in-the-nation Photo ID voting restriction was unconstitutional "on its face." Six of the U.S. Supreme Court's nine Justices rejected that facial challenge, but they decidedly did not, as Abbot incorrectly declared, find that "voter ID laws do not suppress legal votes."

 

What they did do, however, is establish the test that must be applied to such laws in determining their constitutionality. At the core of his decision in the Wisconsin case, Judge Adelman applied that test with careful measure.

 

As Judge Adelman observed, Crawford lacked a "majority opinion" --- that is an opinion in which five Justices agreed on the reasons for the decision. Instead, there were four separate opinions: a lead opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens (joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy), a concurring opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (joined by Justices Thomas and Alito), a dissenting opinion written by Justice David Souter (joined by Justice Ginsburg) and a separate dissent by Justice Breyer.

 

While the various Justices agreed and disagreed on a number of points throughout those opinions, Judge Adelman notes that six of the nine Justices each concurred that the correct approach is to apply what he describes as the Anderson/Burdick test, which requires the courts, on a case-by-case basis, to measure a law's potential damage to voters' right to vote, against the specific claims made by the state as to why such additional burdens and restrictions are necessary.

 

"Even very slight burdens," he wrote, "'must be justified by relevant and legitimate state interests 'sufficiently weighty to justify the limitation.'"

 

In fact, all nine Justices in Crawford agreed that the Anderson/Burdick balancing test applied in the case. The difference between the dissenting opinions and the lead opinion written by Justice Stevens is based exclusively on their respective views on the status of the actual evidence on record before the Court.

 

In his dissent, Justice Souter opined that the Hoosier State's polling place Photo ID law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State's citizens...and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting."

 

In comments to The BRAD BLOG last October, Bill Groth, attorney for the lead plaintiff in the Crawford case, insisted that he had, in fact, presented an adequate record of undue burden on voters in the case. Justice Stevens, however, didn't see it that way. In his lead opinion, the now-retired Justice observed that "the evidence in the record does not provide us with the number of registered voters without photo identification." He found there was no "concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who currently lack photo identification" and reasoned that, based upon the record before the Court, they "cannot conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters."

 

The Court did not find that Indiana's law imposed no burden on voters, as Abbott in Texas, and Republicans elsewhere have attempted to claim, but rather, such evidence had simply not been presented to the Court in that case.

 

In October 2013, after Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, during a book-tour interview, essentially recanted his original majority opinion in the Crawford case --- the one that eventually landed before the Supreme Court. Posner admitted he'd gotten it wrong. Justice Stevens, who retired in 2010, was then asked about his own lead opinion in the case, and told the Wall Street Journal, that he "always thought that [dissenter] David Souter got the thing correct, but my own problem with the case was that I didn't think the record [before the Court at the time] supported everything he said in his opinion."

 

Crawford, Stevens insists, "is state-specific and record-specific." Meaning, the Court's ruling was based on, and applied only to Indiana's version of the law, how it was implemented there, how it affected voters in that particular state, and what information on all of the above was available in the record before the court at the time.

Rudolph Randa's Reversals by Appellate Court Draw Attention

John Doe probe halted by Judge Rudolph
Randa is an investigation that grew out
of embezzlement from military veterans'
funds by Scott Walker appointees.
From left to right: Tim Russell, Scott Walker
and Brian Pierick, Four other Walker associates
were convicted in a Wisconsin John Doe probe

Updated - As Wisconsin awaits the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Judge Rudolph Randa's order to halt the law enforcement investigation known as John Doe II, attention is being focused on Randa's many other rulings reversed on appeal.

Randa's two orders last week to halt the probe of possible collusion by Scott Walker's campaign and out-of-state independent expenditure groups have attorneys mystified, though attorneys are prevented from questioning the ethics of Randa by rules of the State Bar of Wisconsin.

Randa's decision in Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al (Case No.  14-C-139) is contrived to reach a desired result.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) Vice Chair, Ann Ravel says Randa "has cut and pasted a lot of decisions, a lot of language from various decisions, in a way that is actually not applicable. And if it were to be carried out to its full meaning, there would be very few campaign [finance] laws that would continue to be able to be enforced"

Now, Randa's past ruling are drawing attention as a window into the ethics of Randa by journalists.

This weekend's pieces (Bice, Stein and Dietrich, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) includes this passage:

For instance, in 2007, Randa referred repeatedly to a drug dealer's Mexican heritage, saying 'you people' and 'those people,' during sentencing. The judge also discounted the defendant's claim of being a good family man, saying 'even Adolf Hitler was admired by his family. Adolf Hitler loved his dog. Yet he killed 6 million Jews.'

Randa has a reputation as an imperious judge, reminding some of the late U.S. District Judge John Shabazz in this respect whose open contempt for litigants and his own self reverence were infamous.

But Randa takes his self-regard down to the vainglorious, ordering the physical structure of the courtroom architecture altered in a bizarre move transforming the appearance of his bench into something resembling a throne.

Report Bice, Stein and Dietrich: Known for his "authoritarian" manner in court, about a decade ago, "Randa spent $1.85 million in taxpayer dollars to upgrade his courtroom, chambers and library, even adding a 400-pound, hand-carved wooden U.S. District Court seal to the wall and moving the six courtroom chandeliers so they aligned with his bench, not the windows."

But it is Randa's frequent reversals more than his manner that has jurists alarmed.

Randa presided over the infamous prosecution of Georgia Thompson in 2007 by former U.S. Attorney Stephen Biskupic (2001-2008), [Biskupic's wife works as a judicial assistant on Randa's staff and Biskupic now represents Scott Walker's campaign in his law firm begun with his former assistant from the U.S. Attorney's office], that in a spectacular action was reversed by a bipartisan panel on appeal immediately after oral arguments with the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals of the Seventh Circuit, Frank Easterbrook, ordering Thompson freed, and ordering her acquittal.

Randa insisted Thompson remain jailed during the appellate process though the conviction was condemned across the nation.

More examples abound, and it would take a large undertaking to examine all the victims under Randa's judgeship.

One case involves Randa refusing to recuse himself in the child molestation scandal-bankruptcy proceedings by creditors of the Milwaukee Archdiocese (Goodstein, NYT) with whom Randa was associated.

Randa reversed the decision of a federal bankruptcy judge in July 2013 after the Milwaukee Archdiocese transferred $57 Million to a cemetery fund to avoid paying the rape and sexual assault victims of Catholic priests.

"In his ruling, Judge Randa decided that forcing the archdiocese to tap its cemetery fund would violate the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion clause and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law passed by Congress in 1993, " reports Goodstein. (emphasis mine)

That decision has not yet been appealed. 

See also ThinkProgress (Millhiser) for more information on Randa.

If anyone had any doubt that George Will is just another propagandist for the GOP, this doubt can properly dispensed with reading Will's take in which he writes, "U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa, revolted by the police-state arrogance of some elected prosecutors, has stopped a partisan abuse of law enforcement that was masquerading as political hygiene."

Will as usual ignores inconvenient facts, including the fact that two district attorneys are Republicans, the special investigator is Republican, and the vote by the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board to investigate was unanimous.

"Former judges on the state Government Accountability Board voted unanimously last year to authorize the investigation of fundraising and spending by Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and his allies during the recent recall elections, according to a Tuesday court filing," report Patrick Marley and Daniel Bice (April 15, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).

Moreover, John Doe probes in Wisconsin are overseen by a judge and the John Doe probe is an investigation; John Doe probes do not mete out the trial and conviction and sentence as Will would have readers believe in his deceitful prose.

Doesn't George Will research his columns?

Voting Rights Are Foundation of Democracy; Not "Partisan Advantage' Game

The "Genius of Wisconsin" by Helen Farnsworth Mears,
displayed in the third Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda

Disregarding history; avoiding facts; ignoring the law and the Constitution; and heedless of the deeds of Republican officials, three years ago Professor Mordecai Lee tried peddling the false equivalence analysis on the Republican war on voters after Scott Walker signed the unconstitutional voter ID into law.

Since the civil rights movement era, "every argument about enfranchisement or disenfranchisement has really been about partisan advantage," said Lee on the Rachel Maddow Show.

Lee's is a ludicrous position and is one that is taken up editorially in dailies across Wisconsin (ostensibly against Act 23), emphatically so in the Wisconsin State Journal (May 4).

In-person voter fraud doesn't exist—as opposed to what Republicans endlessly assert, or in Paul Ryan's oily racist-dog-whistle style voices surprise about high "urban" turn-out in elections—but let's not call this propaganda, is the State Journal's editorial position.

Stop wasting money defending the in-person voter ID law, the State Journal says, but recognize as well that "(w)ithout a doubt, partisan advantage in the looming fall election and beyond is the main motivator on both sides of the political divide."

No, partisan advantage is not the main motivator on both (whatever that means) sides of the political divide.

It comes as apparent news to the editors of the Wisconsin State Journal, but the civil rights movement is not about securing partisan advantage. The Voting Rights Act is not about partisan advantage.

The right to vote in the United States is a human and civil right through which all Americans work to secure their conception of a better world, that the heart of the civil rights movement means defending fellow Americans in their effort through any political party or association to live their lives and work to change society as they see fit.

The logical inheritor (the civil rights movement and the right to work in pursuit of individual objectives) of the classical liberal roots of America are under attack by the Republican Party, and too few acknowledge this total war on the very fabric of American democracy.

That the perpetrators of this war against the civil rights movement are the Republican and Tea Party does not imply that all must be guilty of seeking partisan or factional advantage.

This is a fundamental, if not intentional, misunderstanding of the civil rights movement.

Wisconsin, and Madison in particular, have an intimate connection with the civil rights movement, dating back to the Civil War, so one would expect a greater appreciation of voting rights from the editors of our state's second largest daily newspaper.

I would respectfully recommend that every Wisconsinite read Desegregation and Civil Rights (Wisconsin State Historical Society) and Historical Society's work on the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Those who seek to discuss the voting ID issue in a civil rights context, in print or otherwise, should understand this history.

Or, if reading history is too much to ask today, here's a video clip that captures what the civil rights movement worked to accomplish. And it is not a "partisan advantage."

Andrew Goodman standing at the foot of a staircase, age 19, wearing a dark shirt. Andrew Goodman
was a civil rights activist and volunteer for the Freedom Summer project. He, along with
James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, was murdered in the summer of 1964.