Today, under pressure from people from across the state, lawmakers withdrew a bill that would have allowed legislators to designate secretly their successors in the event that an attack or disaster should befall Wisconsin. I posted earlier today on the pending legislation. See, New Wisconsin Bill Would Allow Secretly Designated Legislative Successors.
It’s hard to overestimate how wrong and stupid this idea was. Wrong, because it was based on the idea that Wisconsin could only preserve representative government by undermining open and accountable representation. This bill disregards the very tradition of republican government, deriving from the people of this state, as the only legitimate source of political authority.
It is impossible — absolutely impossible — that a free people may have ‘secret’ representatives, unknown to them.
Even as a security measure, it was astonishingly stupid. The bill’s supporters would believe that after a disaster should befall Wisconsin’s sitting legislators, and countless residents, the survivors would support and find comfort in the authority of successors whose names none knew openly before the calamity.
Even the stupidest people, utter buffoons, would grasp that following a tragedy and threat to representative government, these successors would arouse only suspicion, a then-revealed cabal being of no use or confidence to a free, but suffering, state.
I see that Wisconsin State Senator Bob Jauch (D-Poplar) was one of the supporters of this bill (there was a senate version). He was a fool to do so. I have no idea how ignorant each of its supporters is, except to say that every moment anyone spent teaching them was wasted. Both morally and practically, this was a poor and detestable bill, about as shameful as anything our legislature has ever done.
There’s an online link to the legislative history of the bill; six state representatives supported it on July 24th in the Committee on State Affairs and Homeland Security: Young, Pope-Roberts, Roys, Ballweg, Kleefisch and Knodl. To his credit, only Rep. Fred Kessler opposed it.
Over at the Wisconsin State Journal’s fine Four Lakes Politics Blog, Jason Stein quotes Rep. Kessler (D-Milwaukee) as declaring that “[t]his whole thing has almost a banana republic part to it.” (Kessler offered an amendment to make the names of successors publicly known.)
Kessler’s right — this bill did have the stench of a banana republic about it. This is no vulgar hovel, no disgusting place of rule in the name of practicality and expediency. Let Jauch go somewhere else for that, to a foul monarchy, petty dictatorship, or comandante’s regime.
One could scarcely disgrace himself more than to offer the bill; others’ demanding its withdrawal is the least one could expect.