Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 42. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:08 PM for 10h 00m 45s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1964, The Beatles have their first number one hit in the United States with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Patrick Marley reports ‘One throat to choke’: Republican governor candidates Rebecca Kleefisch and Kevin Nicholson call for dismantling the Elections Commission:
MADISON – The Republicans running for governor want to eliminate the state’s bipartisan elections agency, going further than their GOP colleagues who lead the Legislature.
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch in a radio interview last week said she wants to dissolve the Wisconsin Elections Commission and hand over its duties to elected officials so voters have “one throat to choke” if something goes wrong.
Marine veteran Kevin Nicholson expressed a similar view days later when he announced his plan to take on Kleefisch in the Republican primary for governor. He painted Kleefisch as part of the GOP establishment that created the commission under former Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 and attacked her for calling on Republicans last fall to engage in “ballot harvesting” to beat Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Kleefisch and Nicholson are taking their stances as Republicans push for overhauling a host of voting rules. Their efforts so far have been blocked by Evers and the courts.
Evers supports the commission and wants to keep it in place. The Democratic support for the agency is a shift. When Republicans created the evenly divided panel, Democrats said it was designed to fail and predicted it would result in endless gridlock.
Kleefisch’s choice of metaphorical remedy for concerns about elections disputes — throat-choking over litigation — shows she understands the attitudes and vocabulary of the WISGOP core. Her remarks are wrong for the constitutional order and ill-fitting for Kleefisch (who has likely never used more force than getting the cap off a ketchup bottle), but it’s what the Trumpists want to hear.
She and Nicholson will compete over metaphors suitable for the hot-headed-nativist set. They’ll only go lower from here.