The Janesville Gazette, July 7

Political courage required to tame partisan spirits

Eight states didn’t wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to save them. The high court ruled last month to allow states to continue the destructive practice of partisan gerrymandering, but eight states already have - or voted to put in place last year - systems for taming their partisan spirits.

They use nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional and state district boundaries, eliminating to the extent possible partisan considerations that lead to lopsided, noncompetitive elections such as the ones we have here in Wisconsin.

This is clearly the path Wisconsin should take, but it likely won’t for at least two reasons.

For one, Wisconsin voters don’t have the power to change state law through referendums. The Legislature can put referendums on the ballot, but they’re advisory only, and the results often go ignored. The only way Wisconsin can create a nonpartisan redistricting commission is through the Legislature.

But don’t count on it with Republicans in control of both chambers. Yes, Gov. Tony Evers can veto whatever redistricting plan the Legislature devises after the 2020 census, but the Legislature will fight to retain their grossly gerrymandered boundaries created after the 2010 census.

As fundraising chairman for the Republican Redistricting Trust, former Gov. Scott Walker opposes any effort to remove partisanship from the redistricting process. He and other Republicans view nonpartisan commissions as Democratic schemes. Any redistricting map leading to fewer seats for Republicans is, in Walker’s and other Republicans’ minds, a partisan plot to bolster Democrats.

But as we’ve previously noted, these commissions typically include members of both parties and are designed to achieve compromise. Evers’ redistricting plan, which the Legislature has predictably refused to consider, would create a new nonpartisan Redistricting Advisory Commission and give responsibility for drawing lines to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. The bureau would be prohibited from using information that typically guides political parties in determining boundaries, such as voting trends, incumbent residence information and demographic data.

Party leaders from both legislative chambers would appoint four of the commission members, who couldn’t hold a “partisan public office” or be related to someone in public office, and those four members would pick a fifth representative to chair the commission. The five would oversee the creation of the bureau’s map, ideally a map favoring neither party.

The public wants fair elections. It wants its votes to matter, which is why it’s no surprise that 72 percent of those surveyed in a Marquette University Law School poll last year support a nonpartisan redistricting process.

How to achieve a nonpartisan system is the million-dollar question. We hope Democrats remember Evers’ proposal should they someday have the opportunity to enact it. It’s one thing to be in the minority and call for the creation of a nonpartisan commission. It’s quite another to be in majority as Republicans are today and adopt a plan that could lead to a loss of legislative seats.

Wisconsin has exhibited political courage many times throughout its history, such as in becoming the first state to give women the vote. To end partisan gerrymandering, it will need to find that courage again. It can be done, though the search might take a few years.

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Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, July 14

Let doctors prescribe pot for pain

Marijuana is legal for recreational use to the east and north of Wisconsin in Michigan, and in six months will be legal to the south in Illinois. It’s also permitted for medicinal use to the west and southwest in Minnesota and Iowa.

Wisconsin is surrounded by more permissive states that grant their citizens more freedom to use cannabis, so long as they aren’t hurting others.

In all, 11 states and the District of Columbia let citizens smoke pot for pleasure, and more than 20 additional states allow doctors to prescribe the drug to relieve pain, nausea, muscle spasms and other symptoms of disease.

Wisconsin is falling behind the nation as a prohibition state, and that needs to change. While the positive versus negative impacts of recreational use are still playing out and being assessed across much of the nation, the case for medicinal marijuana is clear and convincing.

The Legislature should approve marijuana as an option for suffering patients this fall.

Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats support allowing doctors to prescribe cannabis for medical purposes. Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, sounds supportive, too, and said he wants to take up legislation this fall.

Bipartisan consensus and public opinion in Wisconsin favor an end to strict, punitive and expensive marijuana laws. Republicans who run the state Senate should get on board with a smarter and more reasonable approach, rather than stalling progress.

Patients who use medical marijuana for chronic pain use substantially less opioid medication, according to a University of Michigan study. Opioid overdoses have killed 8,500 people across Wisconsin and ruined countless more lives over the last two decades. So Wisconsin doctors should be allowed to prescribe cannabis if they deem it a better medical option.

Marijuana is far less addictive, hasn’t led to documented overdoses, and shows promise as a safer and effective option.

It’s possible allowing medicinal pot could eventually lead to legalization for fun, as many Republican lawmakers fear. But that’s a different debate, with other states serving as testing grounds. Moreover, any negative repercussions from medicinal marijuana would be more than offset by safer relief for suffering patients. That’s been the experience in other states.

CBD oil, which is derived from hemp, is legal and popular across Wisconsin. So is industrial hemp, which is providing farmers with a profitable crop to grow.

Dane County and some of its municipalities have decriminalized marijuana without dire consequences. In fact, doing so has saved the criminal justice system time and money by allowing law enforcement to focus more on serious and violent crimes.

The State Journal editorial board has supported the decriminalization of small amounts of pot. Lawmakers can assess the pros and cons of broader legalization as more states permit it for recreational use, including neighboring states.

What the Legislature has no excuse for delaying - and should do this fall, as Speaker Vos has suggested - is allow citizens and their doctors the freedom to use marijuana as medicine. Doing so will be a compassionate and responsible step benefiting patients and their families.

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The Capital Times, Madison, July 10

The U.S. census is the cornerstone of democracy

When President Trump and his minions tried to mess with the census, they were messing with the U.S. Constitution and the best instincts of the American experiment. The Supreme Court recognized this and delivered a smackdown to the administration’s scheme to add a citizenship question to the survey. The administration allowed printing of census forms without the citizenship question. But appearances can be deceiving - as the president’s mixed-signal tweeting reminds us. The president has asserted that, no matter what courts say, he’s still looking for a way to include the citizenship query. So advocates for an honest census must remain vigilant in defense of the ground that has been gained - recognizing the prospect that, as University of Wisconsin assistant law professor Robert Yablon suggested after the court ruling, “This is by no means over.”

Yet progressives must, at the same time, go on the offensive, embracing and promoting an understanding of the census as what it is: “a cornerstone of our democracy.”

That is how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and a group of her Democratic colleagues described the census last week in a letter urging the administration to end efforts to “delay and jeopardize the Census Bureau’s ability to conduct a full, fair, and accurate decennial census as required by the U.S. Constitution and the Census Act.”

That intervention by the senators was necessary, even after the high court ruled against the administration. The attempt by Trump and his allies to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is just one of the threats posed by conservative charlatans who seek to game the processes of the federal government for political benefit. But it was a particularly serious one, and it was advanced so desperately - and dishonestly - by administration aides who were called out by the high court.

The assessment of the court’s decision from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was as blunt as it was accurate. “Trump lied about his motivations, and five justices called him on it,” said the Democratic presidential contender. “His proposal to add a citizenship question to the census was nothing but a racist attempt to disenfranchise communities of color.”

The lies that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and others told about the citizenship question were part of a dangerous political game that exploited vulnerabilities of a project that James Madison warned could be undone by partisan factions that “are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

From the start of what has now become his permanent campaign, Trump has imagined presidential powers that do not exist. And he has invited Americans to do the same, exploiting the fact that a lot of what people think is in the Constitution is not there. The founding document did not mention democracy, and it certainly did not outline universal voting rights. It did not propose political parties, primary elections or - and this may surprise Trump - the monarchical flight of fantasy that is “executive privilege.” But it did mention the census. Right up at the top, in Article 1, Section 2, the document requires that an “enumeration shall be made” within successive terms of 10 years. Practically, what that means is that since 1790 the federal government has organized a decennial counting of the people.

The point of this enumeration is a radical and democratizing one. The Founders of the American experiment, who had experienced colonial abuses that included taxation without representation, developed a strategy for counting every resident and using the results to establish representative democracy.

“Enshrining this invention in our Constitution marked a turning point in world history,” explains the Census Bureau. “Previously censuses had been used mainly to tax or confiscate property or to conscript youth into military service. The genius of the Founders was taking a tool of government and making it a tool of political empowerment for the governed over their government.”

The census is a protection against “the enemies to public liberty” that the wisest of the Founders feared might import to the new United States the kingly privileges and abuses against which the American Revolution was waged. The promise of representative democracy was not realized in the founding moment, or for decades, even centuries, after the Constitution was written. Sexism, racism, slavery, segregation, poll taxes and biases against urban centers erected barriers to universal suffrage. Even now, at a point when many of the old barriers have been removed, a new generation of Tories scheme to suppress the will of the people.

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