Wolfe Hunt

What goes around comes around.

State Senate Republicans are just learning that lesson now. They encouraged Scott Walker appointee Fred Prehn to hang onto his seat on the Natural Resources Board long after his term had expired. They refused to confirm Gov. Tony Evers’ replacement for Prehn and they argued that, until they did, Prehn could stay as long as he wanted. On a 4-3 vote, the state Supreme Court backed them up on that.

Republicans did that in part so that Prehn could provide the deciding vote on an ill-advised wolf hunt. There’s a different kind of Wolfe hunt going on now as Republicans are after the head of Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe.

So, I thought the Democrats on the Commission made a brilliant move this week when they used the Republicans’ own tactic against them. The three Democrats on the Commission voted “present” on a motion to reappoint Wolfe while the three Republicans voted for her. But the Republican votes were cynical. They only voted for Wolfe to advance her nomination to the Senate where they knew Republicans would reject her, which would result in her firing.

By voting “present” the Democrats foiled the ruse because the three votes for confirmation didn’t constitute a majority. Essentially, there is no nomination to forward to the Senate. And under the Prehn precedent, which the Republicans themselves championed, Wolfe has her job until she is replaced.

This is great for at least two reasons. First, Meagan Wolfe has done a fine job and doesn’t deserve to be fired. And most of those Republicans know that. They’ve just hung her out to dry as a scapegoat for the Trumpist nut jobs in their party who insist on believing Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. All Wolfe did was execute policies voted on by her bipartisan board to make things easier for voters during the pandemic or to make things safer for everyone.

One of those policies was to not insist that poll workers enter nursing homes. That was perfectly reasonable since the priority was to not spread the virus. Investigator/clown Michael Gableman seized on that, literally making up numbers about voter fraud in nursing homes and claiming that all of that “fraud” benefited Joe Biden. The unhinged wing of the Republican Party demands Wolfe’s head over that and Republican leaders, who of course know better, figure her job is a small price to pay to keep their own jobs.

But the other reason the Democratic commissioners’ move is so great is that it shows the Republicans that their too-clever-by-half move on Prehn can cut both ways. Republicans have been shredding the informal rules of the game right and left (well, mostly right) ever since they gained their impenetrable majorities through extreme partisan gerrymandering. Once they were in no danger of ever losing their control they acted with impunity, never having to worry that the other guys would do the same to them some day. The tables appeared to be permanently fixed, destined never to turn again.

This may all change as soon as the new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court strikes down the Republicans’ gerrymandered maps. The tables may loosen up once again. But in the meantime the Democrats on the Elections Commission just gave both sides a lesson in what happens when you let yourself be governed by your own hubris.

And as a related side note the winner of this week’s Blatant Hypocrisy Award goes to Rick Esenberg, president of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, who said: “There’s a larger issue here in that this just looks bad. It looks like everybody is playing a game, and I think the decision to abstain may backfire against (Democratic commissioners) because of what it implies. People should understand they have an institutional role to play.”

He’s right, but where was he when Prehn and the Republicans were playing a far more egregious game at the DNR?

I wish everybody but Esenberg a nice weekend.