For Release: Tuesday - April 26, 2016
Breathing New Life into Non-Partisan Redistricting Reform/Ending Partisan Gerrymandering
Finally – A Public Hearing, A Promising Lawsuit and Action Citizens Can Take
For three years, from 2012 through 2014, non-partisan redistricting reform was the "hottest' political reform issue in Wisconsin, with meetings and forums about the subject all over the state (CC/WI organized nearly 20 alone), support and frequent editorials from virtually every Wisconsin's daily newspaper (21) and thousands of calls and messages pouring into the Capitol to legislators demanding that they end partisan gerrymandering of state legislative and congressional districts.
But Republican legislative leaders, chiefly Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), jealously guarded their command of redistricting because of the enormous political power they possess. Consequently, they allowed virtually no Republican legislators to publicly support non-partisan redistricting reform and they refused to allow the scheduling of even a public hearing on legislation that would establish a non-partisan process, such as the one that has worked so well in Iowa since 1980.
During 2015, Vos and Fitzgerald shifted their attention to expanding their power, such as destroying the non-partisan Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, transforming Wisconsin's campaign finance law into among the worst, least regulated and least transparent in the nation, and to exempting politicians from effective investigation and prosecution from political corruption. Consequently, good government reform groups such as CC/WI had to shift their emphasis and focus from educating the public about anti-gerrymandering and instead, deploy all of our energy and resources towards fighting those new battles and trying to mitigate the damage caused by the GOP offensive to turn Wisconsin into a one-party state that they could completely control, long into the future.