Republicans Have a Problem With Democrats. But More So With Democracy.

And, like the two hit men in Pulp Fiction, they got the job done in time for breakfast.

By 8:30 local time Wednesday morning, democracy was murdered in Wisconsin by Republican button men who performed the hit right out in the open, if not in broad daylight, because so much of the crime was committed in the middle of the night. At 8:30, the heavily gerrymandered Republican majority in the state assembly passed Senate Bill 8884 by a vote of 56-27. It had earlier passed the Senate by one damn vote, 17-16, and let's pause to recognize Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Alllouez, who joined with the Democrats in trying to stop the murder in progress.

This is the bill that will curb early voting and that also will severely restrict the freedom of the newly elected Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and the newly elected Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul. These measures were the primary reasons for the lame-duck session in the first place, because it is now political doctrine among Republicans in Wisconsin that Democratic victories in the state's elections don't count, and that Democratic voters in the state do not count as much as the nice, rural white folk out in Ed Gein country.

Tony Evers

Exaggerating? They as much as admitted it as they ran the session through the night. Here's State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, explaining his role in the butchery.

“Law written by the legislature and passed by a governor should not be erased based on the political maneuvering of an incoming administration.”

"Political maneuvering," in this case, equals a Democratic governor doing what he was elected to do.

"Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison."

Where almost 250,000 of the citizens of Wisconsin live.

Scott Fitzgerald

Here's state assembly leader Robin Vos, giving the corpse a good kick on the electric Twitter machine.

We have allowed far too much authority to move to the executive branch.

The sheer contempt for democracy in these remarks is matched only by the deep and abiding contempt these two have for the intellect of anyone over the age of five.

For going on eight years, this legislature has been Scott Walker's tabernacle choir on everything Walker has done to sabotage good government in Wisconsin, up to and including the soon-to-be-catastrophic FoxConn deal that's going to be lying on Tony Evers's desk like a dead badger as soon as he takes office. Now that a Democrat was elected—with the help of all those quasi-eligible voters in places where lots of people actually live—Fitzgerald and Vos have noticed that a Democrat will be wielding all those powers that mysteriously leached into the governor's office while they weren't paying attention?

Robin Vos

Scott Walker is a blight on a proud political history that is going to take decades to eliminate. His pet legislators are now seeing to that. A jumped-up county commissioner, surrounded by penny-ante crooks his entire public career, whose corruption in office was never fully plumbed because of a gerrymandered legislative majority and some partisan judges, Walker leaves office trailing a wake of slime behind him that those same legislators are now trying to render permanent.

It fouls the legacy of another Wisconsin governor, Robert LaFollette, who, in a speech delivered in 1924, saw Scott Walker, Robin Vos, Scott Fitzgerald, and all the rest of them coming from a century off.

America is not made. It's in the making. It has today to meet an impending crisis as menacing as any in the nation's history. It does not sound a call to arms, but it is nonetheless a call to patriotism and to higher ideals in citizenship--a call for the preservation of the representative character of the government itself.

If we would preserve the spirit as well as the form of our free institutions, the patriotic citizenship of the country must take its stand and demand of wealth that it shall conduct its business lawfully. That it shall no longer furnish the most flagrant examples of persistent violation of statutes while invoking the protection of the courts. That it shall not destroy the equality of opportunity, nor the right to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the constitution. That it shall keep its powerful hands off from legislative manipulation, that it shall not corrupt but shall obey the government that guards and protects its rights. It is a glorious service, this service for the country. Mere passive citizenship is not enough. Men must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from those who are aggressive for what is wrong. The nation has awakened somewhat slowly to a realization of its peril, but it has responded with gathering momentum.

History is hollow in Wisconsin these days, and that's a crime against us all.

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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. He lives near Boston and has three children.