Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 6:53, and sunset is 6:33, for 11 hours, 39 minutes of daytime. The moon is new, with none percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater will hold a Healthy Lakes Summit today at 5 PM.
On this day in 1980, Michael Myers becomes the first member of either chamber of Congress to be expelled since the Civil War.
Readers may recall that last week, Wausau Mayor Doug Diny removed “[a] drop box, located outside of City Hall, on Sunday and distributed a picture of himself doing it while wearing worker’s gloves and a hard hat. Diny is a conservative opponent to drop boxes. He insists he did nothing wrong.” See from FREE WHITEWATER Performative Voting Disruption in Wausau.
The Wausau City Clerk now has lawfully placed another ballot drop box outside her city hall. Scott Bauer follows his earlier reporting with Wisconsin city replaces ballot drop box after mayor carted it away:
An absentee ballot drop box that the mayor of a central Wisconsin city removed a week ago was back in place on Monday.
The Wausau city clerk said the box was available outside of city hall “for residents to submit absentee ballots, payments, and other important city requests as was intended.”
Mayor Doug Diny removed the drop box on Sept. 22 without consulting with the clerk, who has the authority under a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling legalizing drop boxes to make one available. They are not mandatory in the state.
Emphasis added. Wausau’s major is not a king1. He’s not even a duke, marquess, earl, viscount, or baron. The lawful authority over drop boxes was not his; he acted outside legal authority.
The law assigns the roles of public officials, and in a free society of limited government they do not (and should not) have more authority than the law allows.
Watch this octopus ‘punch’ a freeloading fish:
- A reminder to what’s left of Old Whitewater: this city did not have a mayor during your time, and if not a mayor then neither did Whitewater have a worthy and legitimate ‘unofficial mayor.’ When a few once declared someone an ‘unofficial mayor,’ the term was either a false & arrogant boast or an implicit insult against illegitimate overreaching. Those who thought the term praiseworthy confused praise with condemnation. ↩︎