Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 15
Politicians failed us. So it’s up to citizens to protect Wisconsin.
It’s up to us.
We can’t count on our elected representatives to work together for the public good in Wisconsin. They have proven themselves utterly incapable of compromising even in an emergency to come up with a sensible plan to protect the health of our most vulnerable friends, neighbors and family members.
So, first things first.
Please, as you begin to venture out, keep in mind that the person closest to you at the bar, restaurant, store or barbershop may live with a child whose immune system has been weakened by chemotherapy, a spouse with diabetes and high blood pressure, a retired parent managing any number of ailments, a sibling who, for yet unknown reasons, has a genetic vulnerability to this strange, new coronavirus.
Please, if you are a business owner who has seen years of hard work threatened, be sure to make thoughtful decisions that ensure long-term success. We need you to drive our recovery. And for customers, remember those serving you may be following orders to limit those allowed in, enforce social distancing and insist on masks. Respect them and accommodate them.
Please, remember our first responders, nurses and doctors. These safer-at-home restrictions were aimed at keeping them from being overwhelmed with patients who, sometimes within a few hours, went from having a dry cough to being desperate to breathe.
Those orders have worked to buy time for our health system.
Our hospitals have not been overwhelmed. Vast temporary emergency rooms set up at the Wisconsin Center and State Fair Park have not been necessary.
It’s impossible to quantify cases that didn’t happen, but it appears our sacrifices to contain the virus are working. Doctors have learned a lot about treating the disease, sharing information from around the globe. They’ve learned, for example, how to reduce the need for ventilators.
With the disease continuing to spread, it’s time to remain vigilant and sensible.
When our in-person election happened April 7, after the last failure of our government, we managed to dodge a feared surge in deadly cases. Voters and elections officials went to great lengths to ensure safe distancing in lines and at the polls, to wipe down voting stations with disinfectant, to provide masks to those who didn’t have them, to wash their hands before touching their faces.
The residents of Wisconsin came through on election day. It’s time for us all to do our part again.
Make no mistake. An election that made people wait three hours to vote during a pandemic in Green Bay and Milwaukee was ridiculous, as the now-famous sign said.
And it is ridiculous that Wisconsin is the first state in the union to be opened by court order - and not a unanimous order with clear legal precedent, but one based on the whims and political ideologies of just four Supreme Court justices: Patience Roggensack, Rebecca Bradley, Annette Ziegler and Daniel Kelly.
One of those four, Kelly, was soundly defeated as an incumbent in the April 7 election and will be off the court by July. We can safely assume the decision would have been 4-3 in the opposite direction had the candidate who voters chose over Kelly taken her seat on the court.
The decision is one of momentary legal authority and zero moral authority.
All four justices who overturned the governor’s power in a health emergency had campaigned against judicial activism.
They proved to be against judicial activism until they were for it. They are against judges writing laws unless the special interests that put them up and backed them for office want them to write their own laws.
This was stated best by the one conservative justice who stayed true to his word and voted against them.
“We are a court of law. We are not here to do freewheeling constitutional theory. We are not here to step in and referee every intractable political stalemate,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in dissent. “In striking down most of (the order), this court has strayed from its charge and turned this case into something quite different than the case brought to us.
“To make matters worse, it has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean, and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.”
Thank you, Justice Hagedorn, for your integrity, reason and sense of duty.
State law gives the administrative branch authority to order closures for medical emergencies - as does the law in other states. The powers granted to the governor and his administration are rooted in legislation crafted in 1887, long before the flu pandemic of 1918, the closest antecedent to what is happening now. In 1981, as HIV and AIDS swept across the country, the Legislature gave the state Department of Health Services the power to issue emergency orders. If the Republicans who run the state Legislature don’t like those laws, they should rewrite them.
But that would have required negotiating with Gov. Tony Evers who has veto power. Since before he even took office, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald have proved absolutely unwilling to negotiate with the Democrat who voters elected governor. Again and again, they sue, running to the aid of a Supreme Court where a majority of justices won their seats with the help of the exact same special interests who support Vos and Fitzgerald.
After the decision was announced, Vos and Fitzgerald offered no guidance on how to keep Wisconsin safe from a virus that has killed more than 400 people statewide.
That’s because they have no plan.
“Republican legislators convinced four members of the Supreme Court to throw the state into chaos,” Evers said. “Republicans own that chaos.”
Could Evers have negotiated a reasonable solution with Vos and Fitzgerald, two career local politicians who knew they held the Supreme Court card up their sleeves?
He could have tried, in a bold and public manner, to rally the state toward a united way forward. He could have put forth a vision that showed his understanding of the pain the closed economy has caused, the massive unemployment, the legitimate fears of many who are out of work and others who spent years building a business that they worry may be lost. He could have actively listened not only to his own state health experts but to medical professionals and residents of counties that have seen few coronavirus infections and worked to alleviate their concerns.
Evers also waited too long to propose a delay and alternative to the April 7 in-person election. But he was right to do it when he finally acted - just as the Republican governor and health secretary in Ohio were right to delay their March 17 election. There is no reason for the public’s health to be a partisan issue.
Evers had a plan, based on talking to public health and hospital officials, for gradually reopening the state and was taking steps to do so in an orderly fashion. Five of six measures for reopening the state were already being met when the four justices trumped the administrative branch and even chose to ignore Republican lawmakers’ request for a six-day stay to negotiate a path forward.
Still, we can avoid chaos.
We can take it out of the hands of the politicians - and that includes the highly partisan Supreme Court.
It’s up to us. Again.
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The Capital Times, Madison, May 13
Pocan is ready to go big in the fight against joblessness
Wisconsin is being overwhelmed by mass unemployment. The Department of Workforce Development reported last week that more than a half million claims for unemployment benefits since been filed since the coronavirus outbreak began to ramp up in March. Roughly 16% of the available workforce has is seeking assistance and the numbers are rising rapidly.
So rapidly that, DWD projections suggest, the state’s unemployment fund could run out of money by mid-October. That’s a crisis that must be addressed - not by Wisconsin officials, but by officials in Washington, because this national crisis needs a national solution.
U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Town of Vermont, understands this reality, and he’s working with his Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair, Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, of Washington, to promote a solution that is sufficient to the reality of mass unemployment.
The first step is to acknowledge, as Pocan does, that “we face an economic crisis.”
At the end of last week, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that more than 20.5 million American workers just lost their jobs in a single month. “The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7% in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as most businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to fight the deadly coronavirus,” reported The Washington Post. “If anything, the report understates the damage,” the Post explained. “The government’s definition of unemployment typically requires people to be actively looking for work. And the unemployment rate doesn’t reflect the millions still working who have had their hours slashed or their pay cut.”
Lance Lambert, a data editor with Fortune magazine, offered an even more sobering set of numbers when he wrote this week, “Before this seven-week stretch of 33.5 million initial jobless claims, there were already 7.1 million unemployed Americans as of March 13. When those figures are combined, it equals more than 40 million unemployed, or a real unemployment rate of 24.9 percent. That’s just under the Great Depression peak of an unemployment rate that topped 25.6 percent.”
The dangerously misguided efforts of President Trump and his dimwitted allies in Wisconsin to “reopen” the economy in the midst of a pandemic are not going to address that crisis. As Pocan and every other serious thinker about these issues tells us, “The cost of reopening too early is simple: human lives.” And, as long as alarming numbers of people in Wisconsin and across the country are testing positive, and dying, there is no way that the economy will recover simply because it has been declared “open.”
For now, the fight against the pandemic must continue and, so, too, must the fight to address mass unemployment.
Congressional Democratic leaders have in recent days been crafting their proposal for the next COVID-19 relief package. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is right when he says, “We need Franklin Rooseveltian-type action.” But tossing around FDR’s name and talking about a new New Deal - ideally a Green New Deal - only gets us so far.
Big words must be linked to big programs. Unfortunately, Jayapal said, “the willingness to think big about what we have to do and just get past this inertia is challenging for some people.”
Jayapal and Pocan are up to the challenge, and Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate would be wise to follow their lead.
Jayapal, Pocan and other CPC members are backing a sweeping plan “to end mass layoffs, keep workers in their jobs and connected to their health care and other benefits, prevent employers of all sizes from being forced to close permanently, and ensure that the economy is ready to restart when the COVID-19 pandemic ends.” How? By borrowing ideas from other countries, such as Germany, Denmark and the United Kingdom, who have used their resources to assure that workers are kept on payrolls.
The federal Paycheck Guarantee Act, as proposed by Jayapal, outlines “a streamlined program to provide a three-month federal guarantee for 100% of worker salaries of up to $100,000 to ensure employers of all sizes keep workers on the payroll and continue to provide employer-sponsored benefits. This paycheck guarantee would automatically renew on a monthly basis until consumer demand rebounds to pre-crisis levels.” Her measure establishes strong protections for workers and includes fraud prevention measures. It is flexible, cost-effective, and, Jayapal notes, has been designed to recognize and address racial disparities in layoffs and access to benefits.
That final component is vital, because of a reality noted by Jennifer Epps-Addison, a longtime Milwaukee activist who now serves as co–executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy: “During the last recession, unemployment and under-employment hit black and brown communities the hardest, and the scale of our current unemployment crisis will deepen our racial wealth gap. Keeping working people on payroll at their employer’s is the best way to allow working people to minimize the economic dislocation that is compounding our public health crisis.”
Union leaders and top economists are on board. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says the Paycheck Guarantee Act is “the most efficient way to stop millions of Americans from being laid off, protect access to health care at a time when it is especially needed, and keep businesses of all sizes from permanently shuttering.”
This is a New Deal-level response to Great Depression-level unemployment. It is vital that Congress embrace it, not merely because it is the best way to address the threat of more job losses but because, as Stiglitz explains, adopting the Paycheck Guarantee Act is “the smartest way to stop our economic free fall.”
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The Journal Times of Racine, May 18
Political disagreements shouldn’t lead to threats
If you want good decisions to be made by government bodies, then you need good people to be willing to run.
Sadly, due to extreme divisiveness, the Burlington man who was going to run against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, for the 63rd District seat decided to drop out of the race.
Robert Prailes, a longtime Burlington resident who was going to run as a Democrat, said he dropped out because his family had become “the target of some really ugly personal attacks.”
He said: “I quickly realized that I am not the type of person who thrives in this type of situation, and that I had not adequately prepared my family for the consequences that would arise from my candidacy … I wasn’t going to be able to be myself on the campaign trail knowing that my family’s health and happiness could be jeopardized.”
Families give up a lot of time when someone decides to run for office. It’s a big commitment. But they should never have to give up their safety. That is not right.
The attacks are coming from both sides.
Vos received dog feces in the mail on Thursday, and that is not even the most concerning thing he’s received in the mail. In the days surrounding last month’s statewide election, Vos said he received five death threats after he was instrumental in preventing in-person voting from being postponed.
“We reported that to the police and we had squad cars outside my house. But the fact that someone in the state Legislature has to have police protection because people are threatening your life just goes to show that our country is losing it,” he told The Journal Times on Friday. “These are important issues, but they’re not worth the anger and the vitriol that people have.”
Based on Prailes’ experience and community involvement in Burlington, it would have been a good race between him and Vos. Having the two run against each other would have been a good chance to debate the issues that matter and talk about the best solutions for Wisconsin and for Racine County. Unfortunately those civil debates will not happen now that Prailes has dropped out of the race.
The effects of the coronavirus pandemic mean that a lot of tough decisions will have to be made at the state level.
The disagreements will continue, but there are better ways to express opinions than sending threats or attacking someone’s family.
It shouldn’t come to that. Not now, not ever.
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