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Wisconsin voting rights workers worked to defend citizenss against
Republican-enacted voter obstruction laws. Molly McGrath (L), a
voting rights attorney with the ACLU, works with Madison residents
to get the IDs they need to vote under Wisconsin’s restrictive
voter-ID law. (Courtesy of Molly McGrath) |
Madison, Wisconsin —You should have seen
Wisconsin voters streaming into
metro voting precincts after a voting rights victory in the Summer 2016, (
One Wisconsin Institute v. Jacobs, [Thomsen] (16-3091).
With
black hair and dark skin, voters sometimes teamed-up with white women just to stick it in good folks' collective face; and ole-time Wisconsin values looked frayed as
Gov Scott Walker (R) was knocked out of office in 2018.
Used to be, you only had to deal with black folks at Bucks games and visits to the Milwaukee Zoo. Now, you can find
black folks in Fond du Lac marching down the street like they own the place.
God-fearing racists need not have worried.
Judge Frank Easterbrook is the racists' ace in the hole, though
Easterbrook, and his propensity to play with loose with facts, proved an unpunctual card to play in
Luft v Evers; One Wisconsin Institute, Inc. v Jacobs, (Nos. 16-3003, 16-3052), voting rights cases decided June 29, 2020, (Marley,
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).
Easterbrook's job, as he sees it, is to diminish voting rights, and devise new ways for Republican legislators to stop minorities to vote.
Reports Rick Hasen, election law expert, on Easterbrook's
I-see-no-racism-here June 2020
opinion from the Seventh Circuit: [Hasen's analysis should result in a code-red response, as 2020 will be the most comprehensive voter-obstruction project since the Civil War].
[W]ith no explanation for the 3-year delay ... overall this is a very voter-unfriendly decision (and I say that not necessarily because of the holdings but because of the dismissiveness of the panel’s approach to voting rights issues and what it means for
future challenges).
Some details:
This appeal is complicated: it comes from two separate cases where various election laws were challenged as unconstitutional, a violation of the Voting Rights Act, or both. Some of the decisions of the lower court judges were inconsistent, and some of the issues, came up to the 7th Circuit in earlier challenges to the voter id aspects of the law.
Judge Easterbrook, as is his style, gives breezy and superficial treatment to many of these voting issues, making the three year delay in a unanimous case all the more inexplicable.
The opinion starts out with a very troubling discussion of Judge Adelman’s findings that some of these restrictive Wisconsin voting laws were passed with racial and partisan animus. The 7th Circuit found little direct evidence of racial discrimination and then suggested, in a very troubling way, that making it harder to vote on the basis of party is perfectly acceptable. ('If one party can make changes that it believes help its candidates, the other can restore the original rules or revise the new ones. The process does not include a constitutional ratchet.'). In support of this terrible idea, Judge Easterbrook cites the Rucho case from the Supreme Court, which held that there are no judicially manageable standards to separate permissible from impermissible consideration of party in redistricting. But that did not carry over into voting rules, like rules for early voting, and the Supreme Court has never held that partisan animus provides a legitimate basis for discriminatory voting rules.
Making matters even worse, Judge Easterbrook dismisses without analysis the argument that discriminating against Democrats when so much of the party is made up of racial minorities can in some circumstances be a form of racial discrimination. ('The record does not show that legislators made any of the changes because Democratic voters are more likely to be black (or because black voters are more likely to support Democrats). The changes were made because of politics.').
What
Easterbrook's dismissive opinion does is give the green light to Republicans to stop as many black and brown people as possible from voting, as long as their party-line-enacted statutes and elected Republicans do not explicitly state 'stop black and brown voters.'
Two U.S. District judges in Wisconsin see Republican voter obstruction differently.
For example, Judge James Peterson writes in
One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen, [Jacobs] (16-3091).:
[I] find that 2013 Wis. Act 146, restricting hours for in-person absentee voting, intentionally discriminates on the basis of race. I reach this conclusion because I am persuaded that this law was specifically targeted to curtail voting in Milwaukee without any other legitimate purpose. The legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans. Thus, I conclude that the limits on in-person absentee voting imposed by Act 146 fail under the Fifteenth Amendment, as well as under the Anderson-Burdick analysis.
In sum, Wisconsin has the authority to regulate its elections to preserve their integrity, and a voter ID requirement can be part of a well-conceived election system. But, as explained in the pages that follow, parts of Wisconsin’s election regime fail to comply with the constitutional requirement that its elections remain fair and equally open to all qualified electors.
No rational person in Wisconsin disputes that the intent and effect of the Republican transformation of Wisconsin election law is to obstruct voters, except Easterbrook and fellow Republican judges on the Seventh Circuit.
So, for example, Waukesha County clerk Kathleen Novack (R), commenting on increased early-voting hours, opined in May 2016, that there "too much access to the voters as far as opportunities," (
The Capital Times).
Novack added, when asked about increased municipal early-voting efforts in Madison and Milwaukee: "There has to come a point where it’s just giving over-access … to particular parts of the state." Novack wanted to stop early voting opportunities for Madison and Milwaukee, where most black and brown people live here.
Wisconsin Republicans know that four new Trump-appointed judges
to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—
vetted by the Federalist Society
to whom Trump outsources vetting of judicial appointments—will sustain the Republican Party position against voting rights.
Stopping non-Republican voters from voting is a
strategic initiative for Wisconsin Republicans.
The grave threat to democracy is existential. See
See Twenty of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared. "If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast."
In less than three months in late September, absentee voting begins for the November General Elections.
Republicans know their only chance for victory is to suppress the total vote of non-Republicans, a commitment about which they hold no shame, and that Frank Easterbrook supports on the bench, (
Wisconsin State Journal).
And Wisconsin racists are happy.
"When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."
