Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Posted by Brendan Fischer on November 15, 2013

 

Wisconsin Republicans rolled a raft of anti-democrat measures through the legislature late Thursday night, ranging from additional restrictions on voting to new limits on the right to recall elected officials, following a recall effort against Governor Scott Walker last year.

Recall the Recalls

A proposed constitutional amendment passed by the Assembly on Thursday would limit the recall power that has been part of the state constitution for eighty years.
Currently, the state Constitution allows for recall of state elected officials for any reason. The amendment would only allow for recall if a state officeholder is charged with a felony or ethics violation. Wisconsin is one of 18 states that allows for recalls; of those, only seven limit recall to elected officials guilty of misconduct in office.
The constitutional right was exercised in recent years to trigger a recall election for Scott Walker after the newly-elected governor pushed a series of radical measures through the legislature, including restrictions on public sector collective bargaining, cuts in education funding, and voting restrictions; many of the measures were never discussed on the campaign trail and took the state by surprise, prompting massive protests in the capitol. State Senators from both parties were also targeted for recall. Those recall efforts could never have proceeded had the limits passed Thursday been in place.
The broad, unlimited right of recall was added to the state constitution in 1926 during the Progressive Era as a mechanism of accountability. ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette campaign literature from the early 20th Century says: “By the recall, a faithless public official may be retired without waiting for the evil to be fully consummated. Under such a law, the public official will no longer betray his constituency."
Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) echoed those sentiments on Thursday. "What are the authors [of the recall amendment] afraid of?" he asked. "Why in the world are they trying to set aside the ability of voters ... to recall someone who they think made a mistake? ... It's a democratic right of people to be heard and it's something that should not be suppressed."
The proposed amendment passed along party lines but is not a done deal. A constitutional amendment must pass the full Legislature two sessions in a row, and then be approved in a statewide vote; the earliest that could happen in 2015.
The legislature also passed similar limits on recall for municipal and school officials, which need only pass the Senate and be signed by Governor Walker. Ironically, had those restrictions been in place in 2002, they would have quashed the recall effort that led to Walker's rise to power. In 2002, Walker aligned himself with an attempted recall against then-Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament, who hadn't been convicted of a felony or ethics violation; after Ament resigned, Walker was elected County Executive.

Voter ID, Back Again?

The legislature also voted along party lines to alter the state's voter ID law in the face of legal challenges.
After Governor Scott Walker and a GOP-dominated legislature took power in 2011, Wisconsin was one of several states to pass a law requiring an ID to vote. The law threatened to disenfranchise more than 300,000 voters who did not have the required forms of ID, primarily people of color, students, and the elderly -- voters who had turned out in record numbers just a few years earlier to elect President Obama. Wisconsin's law was subsequently struck down by two separate state courts on grounds that its burdens were too severe and it imposed eligibility requirements beyond those provided by the Wisconsin Constitution. One decision was reversed on appeal, but the other is still in effect and the law remains blocked. The law is also currently being challenged in federal court under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
This latest bill is designed to overcome those legal challenges but would still make it harder to vote for low-income Wisconsinites.
Under the legislation, voters will still be asked to present an ID, and if they do not have one, they must sign an affidavit swearing not only that they do not have the forms of identification required under the law, but also declaring that they either are too poor to get an ID or cannot gather the necessary documentation.
"This bill says that poor people need to declare their indigency. It's a scarlet letter," said Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa (D-Milwaukee).
The bill passed the Assembly 54-38 along party lines and now goes to the Republican-dominated Senate. Its fate in the Senate is uncertain: Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) has said that he would rather wait for courts to rule on the original voter ID legislation before making changes to the law.

Early Voting Limits, Chief Justice Selection Alterations

Another bill will limit early voting to weekdays between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m., effectively ending weekend voter drives in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee and Madison. In 2008, President Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, thanks in part to an aggressive "vote early" campaign where one in five voters cast absentee ballots in-person at their County Clerk's office. After Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, they cut the number of days and weekends for early voting in half, from one month before the election to just two weeks. Still, in the 2012 elections at least 392,000 people voted early at their clerk's offices, and Obama again won the state by a sizable margin.
The measure passed Thursday will limit the practice even further, eliminating early voting on the weekends, and during the weekdays, imposing a 6pm cutoff. This would have a significant impact on working people. Last November in Milwaukee County and other larger counties, voters could cast a ballot until 7pm on weekdays, and between 9am and 5pm on weekends. The measure now goes to the Senate.
The legislature also voted along party lines to amend the state constitution to alter the selection process for the state Supreme Court's Chief Justice, changing it from a seniority system to one based on peer selection. The measure appears aimed at ousting Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, an independent judge on a court that in recent years has become dominated by corporate-backed jurists, many of whom have been elected with support from the state chapter of the Chamber of Commerce and shadowy out-of-state groups. Spending on Wisconsin's judicial elections have skyrocketed in recent years, shifting the court to the right and helping its reputation to plummet.
Like the recall measure, the amendment must pass two sessions of the legislature and be approved by voters.
Among other things, the Assembly also voted along party lines to approve new specialty license plates that read "In God We Trust" and "Choose Life," and to limit public access to a proposed iron ore mine site in Northern Wisconsin.

Voter ID Laws Have But One Intent: To Limit The Franchise

Voter ID Laws Have But One Intent: To Limit The Franchise

October 26th, 2013 12:00 am Cynthia Tucker

Belatedly, federal Judge Richard Posner has arrived at the obvious conclusion about voter identification laws: They are enacted as a barrier to the franchise, an un-American tactic hatched by conservatives to prevent certain people from voting. It’s too bad that his epiphany came so late.
Posner is one of the nation’s most respected conservative jurists. As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, he might have led the nation’s highest court to reject new restrictions around voting. Instead, in 2007, Posner wrote the majority opinion that upheld Indiana’s stringent law, setting the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to reason that it did no harm to an unfettered franchise.
That was quite wrong, as Posner now acknowledges. While he disavowed his earlier endorsement of the law in a new book, Reflections of Judging, he went further in a video interview earlier this month with The Huffington Post, saying that the dissenting view was the right one.
In that dissent, the late Judge Terence Evans wrote: “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” That about sums it up.
Still, I see in Posner’s late-arriving epiphany occasion for hope that debates about obstacles to voting, which have proliferated in states controlled by Republicans, will now proceed with more intellectual honesty. Let’s give up the preposterous justification that the barrage of new restrictions around the franchise — regulations that include limits on early voting — are intended to prevent voter fraud.
Recently, the consequences of those restrictions have been clear in Texas, which was among the states that rolled out new measures after the U.S. Supreme Court decimated the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. (Posner has had interesting comments about that decision too, dismissing its intellectual and legal foundations as non-existent. “The opinion rests on air,” he wrote.)
Eighty-four-year-old Dorothy Card, a Texas resident, has voted for six decades, but she stopped driving 15 years ago and doesn’t have a driver’s license, the ID preferred in voter-suppression states. By late last month, she had tried three times to obtain an ID that would allow her to vote in November elections, according to Think Progress, a left-leaning political blog. Her daughter said she would keep trying but with little expectation of success since each attempt required a different set of documents.

But perhaps the case that poses the biggest challenge for the Texas voter-suppression camp concerns a sitting judge, Sandra Watts. She was nearly barred from voting earlier this month because her name is listed slightly differently on her driver’s license than on voter registration rolls. Her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name, while the voter registration roll lists her real middle name. As a consequence, she was told she’d have to vote using a provisional ballot, which would be checked to assure her identity.
As she told a Texas TV station, it’s not unusual for a married woman to condense her name by putting her maiden name in the middle. “I don’t think most women know that this is going to create a problem. That their maiden name is on their driver’s license, which was mandated in 1964 when I got married …” she said.
Meanwhile, there are no — zip, zilch, zero — comparable stories of fraud prevented by the new laws. Perhaps that’s because in-person fraudulent voting of the sort the new laws ostensibly prevent is virtually non-existent. Analyses have consistently shown that voter fraud is much more likely to occur through absentee ballots, which the voter-suppression crowd have usually ignored.
Here’s the not-so-hidden agenda behind voter ID laws: blocking the franchise for voters who lean toward Democrats. Those voters can be found easily enough among poorer blacks and Latinos, who tend to be less likely to own cars and to have driver’s licenses. Target them, and you can shave off several hundred or a few thousand votes — enough to win a close election.
That’s what Republicans are up to. Let’s hope Posner’s acknowledgment might at least spark more honesty about their motives.
(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)
Photo: Vox Efx via Flickr

Shackled and pregnant: Wis. case challenges 'fetal protection' law

By Daniella Silva, NBC News

When Alicia Beltran was 12 weeks pregnant, she took herself to a health clinic about a mile from her home in Jackson, Wis., for a prenatal checkup. But what started as a routine visit ended with Beltran eventually handcuffed and shackled in government custody – and at the center of a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state’s fetal protection law.
On July 2, Beltran, 28, met with a physician’s assistant at West Bend Clinic at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in West Bend, Wis., for her prenatal visit. When asked to detail her medical history, Beltran admitted a past struggle with the painkiller Percocet. But that was all behind her, Beltran said: She had been taking Suboxone, a drug used to treat Percocet dependency. Lacking health insurance and unable to afford the medication, Beltran had used an acquaintance’s prescription and self-administered the drug in decreasing doses. She had taken her last dose a few days before her prenatal visit.
According to Beltran, the physician’s assistant recommended she renew her use of Suboxone under a doctor’s supervision. After Beltran declined, she said she was asked to take a drug test, which was negative for all substances except Suboxone.
Two weeks later, a social worker visited Beltran at home and told her that she needed to continue Suboxone treatment under the care of a physician, said Beltran, who again declined. Two days later, Beltran found police officers at her home, who arrested and handcuffed her.
According to the police report, the officers took Beltran to a hospital, where she underwent a doctor’s exam. Her pregnancy was found to be healthy and normal, her lawyers say. Police then took her to Washington County Jail to await a hearing – hours later, she was led into a courtroom, handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, where a county judge ordered her to spend 90 days in a drug treatment center.
“Alicia had no idea she was giving information to the physician’s assistant that would ultimately be used against her in a court of law,” said Linda Vanden Heuvel of Germantown, Wis., one of Beltran’s attorneys. “She should not have to fear losing her liberty because she was pregnant and she was honest with her doctor.”
At the hearing, her lawyers say, the judge told Beltran that an attorney would not be provided for her at that time but that she could seek counsel for her next hearing in the case. And yet, a lawyer had been appointed to represent her fetus. “It’s wrong that an unborn child gets an attorney but Alicia Beltran, the mother of that unborn child did not,” said Vanden Heuvel.
Emails and phone calls to Family Court Commissioner Dolores Bomrad and her office were not returned. Assistant District Attorney of Washington County Mandy Schepper declined to comment on the case.

Courtesy of Melissa Wanta

Alicia Beltran, who was forced to spend more than
two months in a drug treatment facility despite
her insistence that she was not abusing drugs,
 talks with her attorney, Linda Vanden Heuvel
of Germantown, Wis.

At the center of Beltran’s case is a 1997 Wisconsin law that grants courts authority over the fetus of any pregnant woman who “habitually lacks self-control” with drugs and alcohol “to a severe degree” such that there is “substantial risk” to the unborn child. Beltran’s lawyers argue that she was not using any controlled substances at the time of her arrest.
In a petition filed in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee -- the first federal challenge of an arrest of a pregnant woman under such a statute – her lawyers claim that Beltran’s constitutional rights were violated in numerous ways. The language of the Wisconsin statute is vague and lacking in medical terminology, they argue, leaving too much room for speculation. Further, they say the statute fails to guarantee due process, as well as violates other rights, including privacy and physical liberty.
In cases like Beltran’s, “the woman loses pretty much every constitutional right we associate with personhood,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a co-counsel in Beltran’s case.
Experts say that criminal prosecutions of pregnant women, as well as forced drug or psychiatric treatment, have been on the rise in recent years in cases of suspected substance abuse, especially as some states adopt laws granting rights, or “personhood,” to fetuses.
National Advocates for Pregnant Women released a study this year showing that from 1973-2005, 413 pregnant women in 44 states were arrested or forced into treatment. Since 2005, there were an additional 300 cases. But these statistics are likely a substantial undercount, Paltrow said, since many of the proceedings happen behind closed doors.
As of this year, 17 states consider substance abuse during pregnancy to be child abuse under child-welfare statutes, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute. Three of those states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, allow pregnant women to be forced into mental health or substance abuse treatment facilities.
Other states have applied criminal charges such as delivery of drugs to a minor or fetal homicide under the same circumstances. And at least 38 states have “feticide” laws on the books, which define fetuses as persons in homicide or manslaughter cases. While these laws are often applied to cases involving violence against pregnant women, they have also been used to prosecute expectant mothers accused of killing a viable fetus.Supporters of these laws say they are intended to protect unborn children. “Child abuse is child abuse, whether it’s in the womb or out of it,” said Jennifer Mason, communication director for Personhood USA, a non-profit organization seeking personhood status for fetuses. Advocates of fetal personhood claimed a victory in January when the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the inclusion of unborn children in that state’s child endangerment statute. Some experts argue that prosecuting pregnant women can ultimately put fetuses at risk, especially when healthcare providers and social workers are the ones reporting women to authorities. There is evidence indicating that women who fear criminal charges or other state intervention are less likely to seek medical care or be honest with their doctors, said Kenneth De Ville, a medical humanities professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., who published a study on the Wisconsin law. “Prenatal care is really the best thing you can do to enhance fetal health,” he said. “And you’re driving women away from prenatal care.”
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has argued that women who seek prenatal care should not be exposed to criminal or civil penalties and calls for expanded and affordable alcohol and drug treatment services for pregnant women.
Mason said she agrees that women should be given professional treatment before state intervention, but that when there is clear evidence of fetal harm, criminal charges are often appropriate. “It’s a very fine line. The medical professional has to be aware of what puts babies in danger,” she said. “I do not think a pregnant woman’s freedoms should be taken away, but child abuse cases are child abuse cases and have to be treated the same way as a newborn in the home.”
For Beltran, the consequences of her case have hit hard. Her family struggled to visit her regularly during her stint at Casa Clare Women’s Facility in Appleton, Wis., a two-hour drive from her home. After being away from work for an extended period, Beltran lost her job in the food service industry, according to her lawyers. She was released earlier this month, but with the case still open, she is still at risk of being taken into custody or ordered into further treatment, Paltrow said.
Beltran was scheduled for a trial in a Washington County court on Oct. 29. If she is found guilty under the Wisconsin law, the court could order her into counseling, supervision by a social service agency, or mandatory drug treatment, and could terminate her parental rights once her child is born. But the trial has been removed from the court calendar -- county witnesses were unavailable on the given date, and a judge recused himself for being familiar with the witnesses, Beltran’s lawyers said -- and no new date has been set.
“[Beltran’s] happy about this baby and having a child, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” Vanden Heuvel said. She added that in a recent conversation, Beltran, who is due in mid-January, told her, “This is my first pregnancy ever, and I just haven’t been able to enjoy it.”