A rare swell of support for unions and organized labor has resulted from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s (and other Republican governors’) recent corporate-funded assault on public workers and their right to collectively bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions. A drama unfolded earlier this year in Madison, where upwards of 70,000 people protested in and around the state capitol, and all the state senate’s Democrats fled to neighboring Illinois in an attempt to prevent a bill to weaken public employee unions from being passed, returning only after the Republican majority found a sneaky, arguably illegal way to put it through.
Now the state remains a battleground at the vanguard of the labor movement, which seems to be fighting for its very survival.
A full-scale class war is still raging in Wisconsin, where many claim that heavily moneyed private interests are trying to break the power of unions and steamroll their agenda of privatization and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations through the state legislature and the courts. The left-leaning capital city recently passed by referendum a resolution, largely symbolic but gaining traction nationally, that moves to amend the U.S. Constitution to clarify that corporations are not people, and therefore are not entitled to the Constitutional protections of free speech that the recent Citizens United case empowered them with more than a year ago. That case unleashed a torrent of corporate money into political campaign spending.
Pro-labor activists have also gathered enough signatures to hold recall elections for four (and counting) recently elected Republican state senators who enabled the controversial anti-union legislation, a game that could pay off big for Democrats in the long run and once again swing the balance of power in the state Legislature. But Republicans have also initiated recall petitions for eight Democratic State Senators on the grounds that they failed their constituents by fleeing the state, thwarting the will of the people by holding up the agenda of elected representatives.
Other allegations have also emerged about illegal campaign contributions to Walker by a regional railroad company’s CEO, and these will likely be exploited to the fullest by lawyers on the left.
In one of the latest, somewhat peripheral twists, a controversial election was held for state Supreme Court Justice—a race whose outcome would swing the court left or right and probably decide the fate of the Wisconsin Republicans’ contentious legislation. In the initial vote count from the April 5 election, liberal underdog Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg was found to have won by a razor-thin margin of a couple of hundred votes over her conservative opponent (and Scott Walker crony) David Prosser, who was largely favored to win before the bill was drafted and subsequent protests occurred.
Then on April 7, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus dropped a bomb at a press conference, announcing that she had forgotten to include the votes of the city of Brookfield in her reporting, and that new results gave Prosser a 7,500 vote lead—a dramatic turn of events that stank like a rat to many election watchdog organizations.
Now one of Wisconsin’s representatives in Congress, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that the federal government step in and examine the results of that election, and the Justice Department is currently reviewing the matter. Other information has come to light, including that Nickolaus worked for 13 years as a data analyst and computer specialist for the Wisconsin State Assembly Republican Caucus, where then-Minority Leader/Speaker Prosser was essentially her boss (some sources even report that he “hired her”). During this election, Nickolaus was repeatedly criticized by her superiors for keeping public records on her own antiquated personal computer.
The new totals have given Prosser at least a tentative victory, though the margin was whittled down enough to ensure a publicly funded recount, which Kloppenburg’s campaign officially requested on April 20. In her late afternoon announcement, the AAG also “called on the [Wisconsin Government Accountability] Board to appoint a special investigator to probe the ‘actions and words’ of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The recount will be Wisconsin’s first in 22 years.
Needless to say, the details are going to be hashed out by litigators for some time to come; anyone interested in the constantly evolving gory details can check out updates at The Huffington Post and other political web portals, or go to straight to the badger’s mouth for breaking news at the MJS’s website, www.jsonline.com. For another interesting test of the veracity of Nickolaus’ statement (and whether anyone who didn’t know this basic bit of technological truth deserved to be called a “computer specialist”), check www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/07/964645/-Kathy-Nickolaus-in-Waukesha-forgot-to-saveReally.
Respected election counter and statistician supreme Nate Silver (538 Blog) has suggested that liberals will likely be disappointed with the ultimate results: “Although the election may still go to a recount, it is now highly unlikely that the outcome will change, unless another county discovers a discrepancy of the same magnitude, but in Ms. Kloppenburg’s favor.” Perhaps this statement is in itself the most telling, along with another from the Daily Kos blog: “It’s difficult to imagine being any worse at stealing an election and lying about it. Honestly.”
Putting all these observations together makes a skeptic want to try even harder to penetrate the Machiavellian minds of would-be electioneers, and the wider view of the electoral scrutiny raises the question: should investigators be looking a little closer at some of the other counties’ returns? It feels a little too convenient that a known Republican operative in an obvious position of electoral influence has been singled out as the villain in this story—Nickolaus might almost as well be wearing a black top hat and twisting the corner of a waxed moustache between her thumb and forefinger. Could this blatantly suspicious character really be a painted decoy, a preferred target, offered up with the intent of drawing the fire and investigative resources of opponents? Have the real dirty deeds been done far across the state, where no one would expect another 10,000 votes to be “lost?” Maybe 10,000 votes for Kloppenburg were lost right in “liberal” Madison, where Walker still has at least a few friends.
Still another possibility is that the Republicans employed a double-dirty “rope-a-dope” scheme in which they intentionally hid the votes in question so the Democrats (who’ve also been historically accused of stealing an election or two, especially in the Midwest) would only think they had to conjure a certain number of votes to win, leaving them short-stacked when the “uncounted” votes appeared. If this be the case, the strategic legacy of the Wisconsin battle will smolder like an ember of painful memory in the Democratic lexicon of political warcraft, and serve as a bitter reminder to the public of just how cynical and corrupt every side of American politics has become.”
