Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 06m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred sixtieth day.
On this day in 1844, Milwaukee’s first daily newspaper, the Daily Sentinel, begins publication.
Recommended for reading in full:
Mitch Smith, John Eligon, and Monica Davey report Behind the Scenes in Wisconsin: A Republican Power Play, Months in the Making:
Last spring, after Wisconsin Democrats seized a state legislative seat long held by Republicans and sent a liberal justice to the State Supreme Court, Republicans began to worry. Gov. Scott Walker, preparing to seek a third term, warned his fellow Republicans on Twitter of the “risk of a blue wave” and publicly urged them not to be complacent with fall elections ahead.
During the same period, an aggressive and methodical alternate strategy was emerging behind the scenes. Over the summer, Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, sought a detailed analysis from the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau of the powers of the governor compared with those of the State Legislature.By fall, with polls showing an extremely tight governor’s race, Scott L. Fitzgerald, the State Senate majority leader, said he and Mr. Vos had conferred about how best to “put on solid ground” some of the policies the Republicans had advanced during eight years of full control of state government.
“We were kicking it around, nervous about the way the elections were going to go,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in an interview.When Wisconsin Republicans this week pushed through a sweeping set of bills that diminish the power of the newly elected Democratic governor and attorney general while expanding that of the Republican-held Legislature, Democrats responded with outrage, calling it a swift and sudden power grab by Republicans.
[Read: A hardball maneuver by Republicans in Wisconsin]But the plans had actually been months in the making, part of what has become a playbook for holding onto power in places where Republicans have had state control to themselves and now face sharing it. North Carolina lawmakers took similar steps when a Democratic governor was elected in 2016, and in Michigan, where Democrats in the midterms won the offices of governor, attorney general and secretary of state, Republican lawmakers were this month weighing new limits to their opponents’ power.
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“It speaks to a new brand of politics where you’re seeing a rejection of the social contract that exists with the public where we respect the outcomes of elections,” said Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader in the Assembly. “It’s not really about policy. It’s about undermining our democracy.”
(This maneuver was in character for the WISGOP. See Once a Gerrymanderer…)