And speaking of Wisconsin Republicans and ratfcking, as though those two things were not synonymous these days, you have to give this one Republican ratfcker credit for Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel informs us.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau said Monday Republican lawmakers must pass the plan to preserve policies enacted under Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature over the past eight years. "The manufactured outrage by the Democrats right now is hilarious," Fitzgerald told WISN's conservative radio host Jay Weber on Monday. "I mean, most of these items are things (that) we never really had to kind of address because guess what — we trusted Scott Walker and the administration to be able to manage the back and forth with the Legislature. We don’t trust Tony Evers right now in a lot of these areas."

And there it is, right out in the open, the basic modern Republican theory of representative democracy in a self-governing republic: Elections Be Damned. Only Republicans Are Allowed to Govern.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald Eric Thayer Getty Images

Thus does Scott Fitzgerald join in history Bob Dole—who, in 1992, said he represented only the people who voted against Bill Clinton—the Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore, and Mitch McConnell, who did everything he could (and more) to refuse to allow Barack Obama to function as president, up to and including refusing to allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice. I mention these things because of the current tendency, especially among putatively respectable Republicans, to assume that their party's assault on the republic began with El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago. We should not fall for this in any way.

Of course, Fitzgerald and his merry band have this power only because the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court refused to take a position on partisan gerrymandering, which, in Wisconsin, was so obviously egregious that the Supreme Court couldn't ignore it entirely. For example, in the 2012 election, the Democratic candidates got 53 percent of the votes in the elections for the state assembly, the lower house of the Wisconsin legislature. But, mirabile dictu, the Republicans got a 60-39 majority out of the deal. In the election just passed, the Democratic candidates won every statewide office, and yet lost ground in the state legislature.

These elections were held using a district map that a federal district court threw out, but that was revived for use by the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the lower court for re-argument, which will not take place until next spring. By then, it may be too late.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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