Because of course he is.
Wisconsin’s new Voter ID laws require voters to present a state-issued photo ID card at the polling booth. It’s a pain in the ass, but doable, right? Just head to your local DMV, wait in line for eleventy-three days, and presto! You have an ID card!
Not so fast.
Now, Scott Walker’s Wisconsin criminal syndicate has devised a plan to make it reaaaaaally hard for Democrats to obtain the requisite ID cards. It’s quite stunning in its boldness, really: Wisconsin is planning to close DMVs in Democratic districts and use the money it will save by doing so to expand hours at DMVs located in Republican districts.
Uh-huh:
The Wisconsin legislature is finalizing a bill to close ten Department of Motor Vehicle centers located in Democratic districts within the state. The money saved will be used to extend operating hours at DMV centers in Republican districts. These cuts come on the heels of new voter ID laws that require voters to present a state-issued photo identification card at the poll booths.
The Wisconsin Republicans, led by Governor Scott Walker, have passed a myriad of unpopular bills that have alienated the public, specifically the public employees whose right to collectively bargain was stripped, their pensions cut and many of their jobs lost. Walker, who has strong ties to Koch Industries, Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has served as the poster child for conservative policy in the nation.
Honestly, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills:
One Democratic lawmaker said Friday it appeared the decisions were based on politics, with the department targeting offices for closure in Democratic areas and expanding hours for those in Republican districts.
A high-ranking DOT official rejected that claim, saying the changes were based on economics, not politics.
Rep. Andy Jorgensen, D-Fort Atkinson, called on the state Department of Transportation to reconsider its plants to close the Fort Atkinson DMV center. The department plans to expand by four hours a week the hours of a center about 30 minutes away in Watertown.
Jorgensen said he was concerned doing that would discourage people from Fort Atkinson from participating in elections.
“What the heck is going on here?” Jorgensen said. “Is politics at play here?”
Gee whiz, ya think?!
Sweet and sour Jesus soup — these people have hit moustache-twirling levels of evil, haven’t they?
What will they think of next? Here’s my guess: the night before election day, GOP operatives will pump Colon Blow through the municipal water systems in Democratic districts and force a toilet paper shortage.
We laugh to keep from crying.
(H/T rikyrah!)
[via progressivetoo]
[cross-posted at ABLC]
Stillwater
These guys are evil. But you gotta give ’em credit: they’re evil geniuses. Always one step ahead of the law.
John Puma
You takin’ domestic fascism pills
trollhattan
Holy crap, that’s the most arch, shameless thing I’ve heard in ages, and that’s saying something, this year.
Has the crazy train already dropped us off at the station? I missed the memo.
The Dangerman
Someplace, in a dark room, deep in the, ahem, bowels of some think tank building, some operative is making a note:
“Check on colon blow”
The Spy Who Loved Me
Ft. Atkinson must be predominantly low-income, elderly and minority. Otherwise, the Republicans dastardly plan wouldn’t make much sense.
Comrade Kevin
Do bananas grow in Wisconsin?
RalfW
Meanwhile, David Brooks is back on the Xanax and thinks Obama is mean and that is why default is coming.
Because the world needed another useless 800 words from that asshole.
As to WI, kay, I’d be agog at the brazenness, but it’s just business as usual for these jerkwads. Those recalls can’t happen fast enough.
How about a link to the ActBlue WI page so’s we can channel some anger towards good!
RalfW
Dangit. Moderation again. Going to bed, grumpy at the Orange Satan, Brooks, and all those r/w fucks in WI.
balconesfault
Every voter in Wisconsin who decided to take a pass on the 2010 elections helped elect these guys.
And they should be reminded of that fact … daily.
Yutsano
I’m ill. The damage that will be done here will take decades to undo.
Karen
Then in Wisconsin the Democratic party can mobilize by having people taking turns taking anyone who needs the ID to the Repubic districts DMVs. Get minivans and set up a system.
Show them that their stupid plan won’t work.
J. Michael Neal
I would like to see an actual list of where DMVs are being closed and where hours are being lengthened. Or at least see this reported in a more mainstream source. It’s not that I don’t believe that Walker and his goons aren’t capable of this. They are. It’s just that, “One Democratic lawmaker said Friday it appeared the decisions were based on politics,” doesn’t sound very definitive to me.
Farther down in the Business Week article is this:
That sounds like a legitimate concern. I think that it’s distinctly possible that the problem here is that the DMV is underfunded more than that it’s making politicized decisions on where to close offices. Which is, indeed, a problem with the voter ID law. It’s just a slightly different problem.
Spaghetti Lee
Fuel to the fire, I’d say. Recall elections are in two weeks, and the Republicans were nice enough to give us a GOTV dry run with those fake primaries.
Disgruntled Lurker
Oh boy, I think I know what it feels like to be a concern troll now.
ABL, I’m a big fan of your work, but I don’t think there is quite enough evidence to support your conclusions here.
The claim made by the DOT is that they have to comply with the Voter ID law’s (unfunded) requirement to have an office open in every county for at least 20 hours a week. Right now, less than half the counties have that. That’s why offices are being closed.
I find that explanation to have prima facie plausability. In addition, I would expect that the counties that currently don’t have an office open 20 hours a week to be rural, and hence Republican. I would expect that the counties that have a surplus of offices to be more densely populated, urban, and Democratic.
So while it may be cruel, undemocratic, and stupid to close those offices, there is no evidence that it is intentional.
What would be needed is evidence that surplus offices in Republican districts are being preserved in favor of closing surplus offices in Democratoc districts. And I don’t see it.
So it seems to me that Occam’s razor cuts for stupidity over conspiracy, given what we know.
Spaghetti Lee
@14
In Wisconsin, a lot of the rural counties lean Democratic. It’s the suburbs and exurbs in the east where Walker’s base of support comes from. Milwaukee itself is Democratic, but once you get into the suburbs it’s very dark red.
scav
@J. Michael Neal: Agreed, we definitely need a bit more data because any bias would be really really easy to prove without too much effort so they’d be really really dumb to attempt this sort of shit. Geographers could eat them for breakfast and they love real world examples to work on in classes (and some analyses of bias would be entirely appropriate for intro to GIS courses) — and that’s before we sic the MA students on them.
bonkers
Actually, I don’t give them credit at all as being geniuses. People used to say that kind of thing regarding Karl Rove and Friends too, yet none of their schtick would work if there was an actual Press to question them. The role of “The Press” or Journalism in general is to find “the truth” as best they can. This idea of presenting “both sides of every story” is one of the great harms brought upon America in recent times.
95% of what Repugs argue for is literally nonsensical and is contradicted by historical FACT, yet they continue to dominate the MegaMedia with their inane drivel. If there were actual Journalists in the MegaMedia rather than paid propagandists, the most elementary amount of questioning leads to any Repug leader looking like a complete buffoon.
A great example of this was right after President Obama ordered the Navy Seals to take out Osama bin Laden. THE VERY NEXT SUNDAY, all the shows were DOMINATED by Shrub Admin retreads (and failures, mind you) and other Repug politicians and pundits (well documented at the time by several blogs) diminishing this historical accomplishment which was led by the brave leadership of President Barack Hussein Obama. As Repugs like to say, “mission accomplished,” since I had several “friends” on Facebook posting things right after bin Laden was killed about how President Obama didn’t do anything…it was only about the SEALS when this was clearly not the case as this, like any great military achievement, was a team effort with smart leadership. Within a couple of weeks, this amazing accomplishment was rendered meaningless to the point where I just saw a number of Repub Congresspeople talking last week about how President Obama is “weak on terror,” and the “reporterS” made no mention of how President Barack Hussein Obama had just got bin Laden! Oh, those good little robots though…doing their pre-programmed duties….mindlessly…
It is easy to evil, however. A Repug has every advantage in the world. A seemingly endless supply of money from an incredibly small handful of wingnut welfare sugar-daddies. Complete access to as much as they want of America’s discourse through the MegaMedia, which is owned by about 5 multi-Billionaires, several of whom don’t even live in America. There is no genius there whatsoever. Just craven thirst for more and more money. That’s the triple truth, Ruth.
Genius is, given all that above and then some, getting yourself elected as America’s first melanin-enhanced President with no connection fo money whatsoever. Repugs are bumbling fools who just happen to have the deck stacked in their favor. Replacing and/or reforming the MegaMedia should be Issue Numero Uno, since everything else stems from what the electorate thinks as they enter the voting booth.
GregB
Watch this video of a woman from Wisconsin trying to register her son to vote.
Republican small government in action…wherein the person has to submit their bank statement to some government bureaucrat who then determines if there is enough activity for them to move on to the next station of the gerbil treadmill.
Link.
Calouste
@J. Michael Neal:
Doing that on a per country basis means that low population density (and thus often Republican) countries get relatively more DMV office hours than higher population density (and thus often Democratic) countries.
The lowest population county in Ohio has 12,000 inhabitants. They get 1,000 DMV hours/year, even if there’s only one clerk. If everyone renews their license every 4 years, that’s 20 minutes per renewal. Sounds a tad much. And that’s assuming there’s only one clerk.
Disgruntled Lurker
Fair enough. I don’t know Jack about Wisconsin demographics. My home state is largely red except in urban areas and I just assumed.
But if that’s the case, then it should be even easier to answer the question of whether there is bias or just coincidence.
252man
Wherever these soon-to-be-closed offices might be, it makes meeting the new requirement to vote tougher to meet. Isn’t this ALWAYS the goal of the Republicans?
JenJen
@Yutsano #10: It’s so brazen and so quick and so effective that I can’t keep my head around it. I’m dizzy. What I always worried would happen seems to be, you know, happening.
Yutsano
@JenJen: What’s really interesting is how the recall elections are having zero effect on changing the behavior of the Republican Senators. Then again, if you know you’re going to lose, better to get your agenda passed as rapidly as possible. But they’re voting their way out of a job.
dead existentialist
Fuck me, geniuses.
Who controls the purse-strings controls the purse. If the Kochsuckers control funding that they essentially cut off, then they get to dictate how that funding is distributed. This is the new Republican MO: cut taxes to starve the beast and allocate what’s left over to ensure that only your people have access to the food supply.
It’s the niggafication of America come home to roost.
Until recently the general population of white folks was favorably factored into the equation of wealth distribution because it was just simpler to dump on the darkly hued, but we’ve reached a tipping point where the elites don’t need the singular achievement of being born “white” as a sign that you’re one of the preferred.
Nowadays, the preferred color is green, and that’s a color that has gotten away from the vast majority of Americans in recent years.
Remember the dirtiest little secret ever: America was founded on slavery, not freedom. Ask yourself this: which of the two has been more prevalent throughout the course of our history?
(And think of “freedom” as working solely for your self-interests vs. “slavery” as working primarily for another’s.)
Man, I’m drunk and posting like it.
C.S.Strowbridge
When the voters throw him out of office, the Democrats better throw his ass in jail. This is corruption that goes beyond politics and is clearly criminal.
dollared
My father used to chortle every once in a while that “A man’s family and property are not his own as long as the legislature is in session!”
Little did he or I know that his own Wisconsin legislature would prove him correct.
dollared
Yutsano and JenJen, the Republican smash and grab approach has been insanely effective.
That’s another reason why I’m currently pissed at the national Dems, including our Prez. Conceding that allowing the Bush Tax Cuts to lapse is a “revenue increase” rewards Republicans for doing things in the most extreme way possible. The minute a crazy, stupid thing is signed into law, it becomes the new baseline.
And we need to understand the 2012 impact. they are cutting hundreds of thousands of Americans off from voting. This will swing one or two states. They play a vicious, mean game where American citizens are just pawns.
Triassic Sands
Jeebus, no wonder the Right is taking over in Wisconsin.
kay
This is what they do.
They have to comply with access provisions to get these laws past a federal judge, then they under-fund and poorly or maliciously administer the access provisions.
If he’s closing the offices in urban areas to re-allocate funds to rural or suburban areas, it’s going to have a disparate impact on urban voters, because urban voters are much less likely to have a driver’s license. He knows this, of course. Everyone does.
Wisconsin has been a target state for voter suppression since 2000. Milwaukee will be ground zero of the suppression effort. They’ll need a freaking army of volunteers, and a state-wide voter protection plan. It’s basically a war.
kay
I disagree. Voting is a bed-rock state function. If conservatives in Wisconsin can’t administer the laws they write properly, they should stop passing laws until they figure out how to do so. It’s not the job of volunteers or political parties to run elections. It’s the job of Wisconsin’s state government. In some ways, it’s their first and most important job. If they can’t do this, they shouldn’t be in there.
kay
I don’t want to lower the bar so conservatives can wriggle under it.
Walker is a US governor. If he administers an election improperly, it’s his failure. It’s not the pollworkers fault or the voters fault or the fault of a political party. If you change the rules, and he did, you’re responsible for the ensuing chaos.
If this is a clusterfuck, and it will be, because they rammed these boilerplate laws through with no analysis of the particular needs or composition of the voting population in any one state, he failed at a fundamental function of a US governor. Doesn’t get much more bedrock than voting.
bemused
GregB@18,
I love the fact that the DMV employees don’t have to tell you if you’ve marked the wrong photo ID box. And the homeless are at the bottom of the caste system.I don’t remember which state passed the new law that says poll workers don’t have to tell a voter where their polling place is if he/she has gone to the wrong one.
I’m waiting for some low info Republican voters to fall victim to these new disenfranchisement laws themselves and if they will figure out who is to blame.
artem1s
no doubt there are Republican voters in those districts. they will mostly be elderly and likely poor too. The local Dems should make a call to each and every R voting household and let them know what their party thinks of their right to vote. Not to mention how much further they will have to go and get their tags. Believe me this stuff matters to these kind of people. I worked a local election right after a redistricting and had people calling me and crabbing that they had to go a whole tenth of a mile further to vote. And this was before mapquest and high gas prices. He measured it on his odometer likely and was highly pissed that someone had moved his cheese.
Exurban Mom
@ bemused #32, that would be Ohio. So proud of my home state….
bemused
Exurban Mom,
My sympathies. It’s been bad enough in MN to have republican majorities in both houses and a shutdown thanks to them but if we had gotten Emmer instead of Dayton for governor, we would be going through a lot more of the same crap.
If I knew nothing else about Kasich, I would have pegged him as a low life after reading about his calling police officers idiots for ticketing him for his own mistake. What an arrogant baby. So much for personal responsibility.
El Cid
__
I always thought that the “genius” of Rove et al was just a gleeful willingness to do the sorts of thuggish, immoral, and nearly criminal things others wouldn’t do.
It’s not like it was “genius” for someone to be the first to drive by a shop or restaurant full of their enemies and fire in with a machine gun.
shortstop
Calouste:
But this is good, because, as the enraged red portions of Illinois told Chicago and East St. Louis after we reelected Pat Quinn (narrowly saving ourselves from Scott Walker II), it’s unfair that the combined populations of two urban counties should be able to put someone into statewide office. Elections should now be based on square acreage, apparently.
kay:
They are, as you say, taking the long view — across the country, this is the long-term plan for dealing with changing demographics that distinctly do not favor the GOP. We have a war, and it’s going to be a long one, and it’s nationwide. But in the short term and more locally, I get the feeling that Walker and the WI GOP Senate are moving as fast as they can to enact as much bad legislation as possible before their asses are recalled.
Bullsmith
When do Wisconsin Republicans start to turn on the party that clearly doesn’t see them as anything more than useful idiots. Bringing in right wing policies is one thing, blatantly attempting to destroy the State’s ability to hold fair elections seems quite another.
Jado
snark begins
HEY!
The Republicans TRIED being subtle. For eight years they said things like “National Security” and “Global Terrorism” and “Why do you hate America?”, but you all elected a black man president anyway. So now, the gloves are off. You elected the Republicans in 2010 with a mandate to never allow anyone else to be in charge ever again.
NO MORE PRETENSE. NO MORE DOUBLE SPEAK. NO MORE HIDING.
The Republicans are out and proud, and their coming for your kittens. LONG LIVE THE EMPIRE OF THE SITH!!
end snark
kay
When they first put voter ID in Ohio, it took a while to catch up, and mitigate the effects of the suppression effort. Then, when they took over again in 2010, they re-drafted the law to make it tighter. That will happen in Wisconsin, too.
The voter protection effort in Ohio got better, however, because now we’ve done it a time or two. By 2010, I was getting an email packet of all the motions I might need to file where I only have to fill in my county, because an election, of course, only happens once, so there’s urgency. Voter access issues are handled on a fast track at the county court level, like, NOW. That’s why you see all those injunctions and emergency orders in poorly-run elections.
It’s like an arms race. We’re getting better at it :)
I feel a real sympathy for Wisconsin because they’re where we were in 2005, and they don’t have any time before the recall elections. I’ve come to understand that the provisions that are put in to “guarantee” access (provisionals, free ID access) are a lie. They put them in the laws because they have to, but they don’t administer them properly, and they don’t work.
I think that will be the next round of lawsuits, that the “fail-safes”, um, FAIL. They’ll have documentation because they’ll have the (legit) provisional ballots that weren’t counted, and the voters who attempted to get ID, but failed.
Marc
Closing busy DMV offices in cities and opening empty ones in rural areas is textbook discrimination, sorry. ABL is completely correct here.
bill
“I get the feeling that Walker and the WI GOP Senate are moving as fast as they can to enact as much bad legislation as possible before their asses are recalled.”
Something tells me that’s the Reptilican plan nationwide, especially at the federal level. Strike while the iron is hot because you might not get another chance any time soon.
bill
This appears to be the Reptilican strategy nationwide, especially at the federal level. Strike while the iron is hot because you might not get another chance anytime soon. It explains why so much of their effort is devoted not just to wrecking New Deal- and Great Society-type social programs but also to legislation to ensure their hold on power, which they could not retain if they had to convince voters that their way was the better way.
Ohio Mom
The other part to this is that it can be a real hassle getting hold of the sorts of papers you need in order to get an ID.
I know where my birth certificate, Social Security card, marriage license, etc. are: in our safety deposit box. There’re there partly for security and partly because that way, we know where they are — we misplace things around the house on a regular basis. But it costs money to rent a bank box and I’d guess that’s not in the budget for most low-income people.
Many years ago, in my pre-bourgeoisie days, I needed a new copy of my birth certicate for something, I’m guessing a passport. The copy I had was falling apart. It was whatever existed before xeroxes and around the folds, flakes of the paper were peeling away. That’s probably because for lack of a better place to keep it, it was squooshed into my wallet.
This was pre-internet (but let’s remember, lots of elderly and low-income folks are still living a pre-internet lifestyle), so it took a series of calls to The Bronx Board of Health, including lots of transfers and time on hold, to find out how to apply for a copy and where to send the check (let’s also remember that lots of low-income people don’t have checking accounts).
In other words, you can be down the block from a DMV and you still might not be able to pull it together to get the kind of ID you need to get an ID card.
Everything the right-wing does is multi-faceted and I’ll forever argue that they are indeed evil geniuses.
jcgrim
Jim Crow is not dead. It’s alive and kicking in WI.
Dr. Squid
After a few weeks when they decide to mail it to you.