Here’s a powerful speech given to Lake Mills Progressives Informed and Engaged (Lake Mills PIE) by Matt Rothschild on February 26 2016.
When you click away to read the whole thing, please be sure to come back and look at a few other blogs posts here.
LAKE MILLS, WI – Thanks, Leslie, and Progressives Informed and Engaged, for inviting me. I would have come anyway, but the lure of homemade pies made it absolutely irresistible since pies are my favorite things to eat.
I’ve been baking my own fruit pies for 30 years now, and if you need to know, I use a blend of Organic Valley butter and that old standby, white coagulated Crisco, for my shortening, and it works every time.
You know, I could talk about pie all day, or about birds, since I’ve been a birdwatcher for 50 years, and it’d be a lot more diverting than the topic at hand, which is the plight of democracy in Wisconsin.
But that’s why we’re here, and that’s why we all do the political work that we do:
because we believe in democracy,
and we cherish Wisconsin’s historic reputation for clean government,
and we’re appalled at the destruction that the Scott Walker Wrecking Crew has wreaked on our beloved state in the span of just five years.
The fact is, we’re in the midst of a counterrevolution right now.
Our state has been taken over by people who don’t give a damn about democracy.
They don’t give a damn about clean and open government.
They have no respect whatsoever for the public good.
There’s a wholesale assault on democracy in Madison right now, waged not only by Gov. Scott Walker but also by Speaker Robin Vos and your very own Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and by the corrupt justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court – and they’re all doing the bidding of the corporate powers behind them.
When I said they don’t give a damn about democracy, that’s obvious by the fact that they passed one of the strictest Voter ID laws in the country.
I don’t if you saw the recent John Oliver segment on his HBO show ridiculing your own Joel Kleefisch, but it was a thing of beauty. He showed Kleefisch on the floor of the Assembly denouncing people who vote more than once in an election, and then Oliver showed him voting twice on one bill, once for himself and once for an absent legislator. Oliver also showed that Sauk City’s DMV is only open on the 5th Wednesday of every month for registering to vote, and there are only four months with five Wednesdays this year.
That’s how they disenfranchise people. And they do it in other ways, too.
Republicans have also gotten rid of weekend voting before the elections.
And they’ve done away with allowing the League of Women Voters, or anyone else, for that matter, to be deputized to register people to vote.
They even won’t let the city clerks conduct voter registration efforts in public libraries.
Green People's Media 