The GOP stole Wisconsin; now they're trying to steal it again on the way out -- PROTEST TODAY!

The Republican election of Scott Walker and his band of Ayn Rand cosplayers was a triumph of massive corporate spending, voter suppression and gerrymandering that meant that the votes of the majority of Wisconsinites would no longer count; despite that, last month's midterm elections saw the governorship and Attorney General flip to progressive Democrats with wildly popular platforms.

As Wisconsin's Republican legislature sits for its lame-duck session, they have unveiled a plan to steal the state again: a sweeping set of unprecedented (and even unconstitutional) legal changes that would neuter the governorship and the A-G: a ban on early voting (previously struck down by the courts); a logistically impossible shift to the next state Supreme Court election calculated to hand the seat to a far-right extremist who says that affirmative action is literally indistinguishable from slavery, defended gerrymandering, and says same-sex marriage "will eventually rob the institution of marriage of any discernible meaning"; to strip the A-G of the power to back Wisconsin out of its petty lawsuit to kill Obamacare; to strip the governor of the power to overturn the previous Governor's attempt to gut Medicare; to force the state capital to allow private persons to carry firearms on its premises.

Moveon Washington director Ben Wikler says the changes are "chillingly cold-blooded":

"They gerrymander the legislature to end majority rule. They move powers from democratically elected offices to the undem legislature. They entrench by suppressing votes & protecting partisan Sup Ct justices."

Wisconsin was always pitched as a living laboratory for oligarch control by the Koch brothers and their thinktankie allies: if a progressive, egalitarian state could be turned into a massively unequal state where the will of the people could be ignored within a structure that retained the trappings of "democracy," then the whole country could follow. Read the rest