Political Heat

Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany ran for Congress this year in the state's 7th Congressional District. He won by a margin of about 20,000 votes against his Democratic opponent, Tricia Zunker, in the election that was held last month. This past week, Tiffany also signed onto an amicus brief for a lawsuit from Texas, alongside more than 120 other Republicans in Congress. That lawsuit is calling into question the validity of votes in four states that helped President-elect Joe Biden win in this year's presidential election. Among the four states whose votes are being disputed is Wisconsin. The merits of the case Texas brought against these four states were laughable, at best, and deeply worrisome at their worst, as Texas AG Ken Paxton cited supposed election fraud without providing substantiated evidence of any kind , and had sought to invalidate millions of votes based off of those errant claims. The Supreme Court on Friday denied the request to hear the challenge. There are some w...

Here's what you need to know about the Texas lawsuit against Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, which is supported by Republican officials in 17 other states, as well as by more than 100 GOP lawmakers in Congress: It's completely bogus. But it's also revealing of something disturbing that has developed in our American society: a belief by a significant portion of the right-wing in this country that democracy deserves to die . Beyond containing complaints about the way states changed voting laws in light of COVID-19 — and the hypocritical manner of those complaints , as states that have enjoined themselves in Texas's lawsuit, including Texas itself, ALSO made similar changes to their election laws because of the pandemic — the suit also seeks to allow Texas to tell other states (including Wisconsin) how to run their own elections.  That's not how our government is set up to be. Wisconsin, Texas, and other states create their own standards for how ele...

WHEN IT COMES TO CORONAVIRUS in the state of Wisconsin, we are failing. Hard. We're even doing worse, comparably speaking, to the rest of the nation as a whole when you look at the past 75 days. On August 31, Wisconsin had approximately 75,000 cases of coronavirus , and counted 1,122 deaths at that time from the pandemic. On November 12, those numbers increased to around 293,000 total cases diagnosed, and 2,515 deaths counted. In the U.S. overall, there were around 6.27 million cases of coronavirus on August 31 ; on November 12, the U.S. counted 10.88 million. When it came to deaths, the country saw around 188,000 counted from COVID-19 on August 31. This week, the number is up to 248,000. The U.S. obviously has a higher number of deaths and cases of coronavirus. But if you grew the population of Wisconsin to be proportionally equal to the nation, it would show we're actually doing worse during this time period .  In fact, if you took the change in new diagnoses discovered in W...

REPUBLICAN ASSEMBLYMAN JOE SANFELIPPO made headlines this week after his comments set off concerns that he and other legislative Republicans in the state might try to overturn the will of Wisconsin voters. President Donald Trump lost the state in the 2020 election last week to now-President-elect Joe Biden. Republicans across the country are considerably upset about this — so much so that they appear willing to defy our nation's norms, as Trump has done, and refuse to accept Biden as the next president. Sanfelippo looks to be a lawmaker willing to take this defiance to the extremes. Discussing the matter on Monday, he made the wild suggestion that, if voting irregularities could be found, the state's electors in the Electoral College ought to be allowed to vote against how Wisconsinites voted in the presidential election . "If an investigation shows these actions affected the outcome of the election, we need to either declare this past election null and void and hold a new...

WITH THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION having now been decided , it's time to once again say, with complete conviction and truth, that the Electoral College simply has to come to an end, once and for all. The idea is simple enough: end the Electoral College, and let every vote across the country count equally, no matter what state you live in. There's no reason why we shouldn't do this. The Electoral College has, on many occasions, thwarted the will of the American people to pick their commander-in-chief by allowing votes in some states to "weigh" more than votes in others . It did so in 2000 and in 2016, and in spite of Joe Biden's win this year, it came dangerously close to doing it again in 2020. But some have argued that the Electoral College makes less-populous states more relevant — or that candidates for office won't travel to those areas if they can "camp out" in high-population areas to win an election. There's no evidence to support ...

ON SATURDAY NIGHT , President Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin. It was an event that brought out his most ardent supporters in one of the reddest parts of the state. Naturally, even though coronavirus continues to rage on in the U.S. ( and in Wisconsin in particular ), the event was a mostly maskless affair . As freelance reporter Ethan Duran noted, hundreds of individuals were packed in tight at the event without donning any protective covering whatsoever . Not everyone was maskless, however, because the Trump campaign has determined it doesn't do them any good to actually SHOW people not wearing masks. So, as has become their modus operandi as of late , people who were on the stage behind Trump were wearing masks — you know, so that the cameras could show he takes this pandemic seriously. Of course, Trump doesn't take any of this seriously, as was evident during his speech. At one point, he told revelers standing before him that the virus is "g...

ONE QUESTION THAT DEMOCRATIC presidential nominee Joe Biden seems stuck on during the waning weeks of the campaign is whether he'd "pack the Supreme Court" or not if he's elected, meaning would he increase the size of the bench in order to create a better balance of liberal and conservative justices. So far, he's not made his views clear on the subject. But he absolutely should "pack" the court, with one extra justice, if Amy Coney Barrett is appointed. President Donald Trump has had three Supreme Court vacancies during his presidency. Only one came in the middle of his term, with the first nomination coming about due to Republicans blocking President Barack Obama's choice the year before Trump took office. Republicans insisted that Obama's pick not be heard since it was so close to a presidential election. Now, they're inconsistently rationalizing that rule doesn't matter anymore . Any way you slice it, the hypocrisy makes clear that T...

TWENTY-SEVEN WISCONSINITES DIED FROM coronavirus in a single 24-hour period, according to numbers released by the state Department of Health Services website on Wednesday. It's the highest number of deaths the state has seen from the disease since the pandemic reached our borders. But for some, 27 might be a small number.  Let's put it into perspective. Wisconsin has approximately 5.8 million residents. If you extrapolated the number of deaths reported in the state on Wednesday to a population equivalent to the country's (328 million), there would be approximately 1,470 people who had died. According to the New York Times, as of yesterday the U.S. was seeing a 7-day average of 733 deaths per day . In other words, Wisconsin's death rate from coronavirus, as of Wednesday, is more than double what the nation is seeing at this time. We need to do better. Unfortunately, too many Republican leaders in the state legislature don't agree, do not believe that any action is ...

THE PASSING OF Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the subsequent battle that is being set up as a result, is a consequence of a failed system that demonstrates how, in recent years, we've made an institution that shouldn't be political into just that. With Sen. Mitt Romney's (R-Utah) announcement on Tuesday that he will support the nomination process for a new justice ahead of the presidential election — bucking the precedent that was set by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans in 2016 when former President Barack Obama had sought to name Judge Merrick Garland to the High Court — there's a high possibility that a "lame duck" appointment by current President Donald Trump will be named to the Supreme Court, likely after he has lost the presidential race itself in November. If that happens, many Democrats will make pleas to "pack the court" after Joe Biden gets sworn in, assuming he does indeed win the election; and, given the highly-par...