Suppose you are a corrupt state politician. You were just elected to office in a once-in-a-lifetime wave that swept your party into power. You find your new position to be a very nice one. You get paid pretty well for doing little actual work. There are many ways to bring-in money on the side, if you don't get caught. And the benefits are great.
You need to keep this great gig going. Your number one priority is to keep getting elected. Your number two priority is to get rich people to give you money so that you can keep getting elected. And you are not alone. Many other newly-elected officials in your party want to keep their job, too. You decide to work together to reach your common goal of self-preservation.
One of the first things you do is to weaken the opposing party. Weaken them in every way possible. You attack their major contributors. You introduce "tort reform" to punish the trial lawyers. You all but demolish public sector unions. After that dust settles, you go after private sector unions by jamming-through Right-to-Freeload.
You go after the opposing party's voters, trying to lower their turn-out. You increase residency requirements to curtail student voting. You push through photo ID, making it more difficult for students and the poor to vote. Because the opposing party has effectively used early voting, you drastically cut the number of days that early voting is allowed. Because the opposing party has effectively used voter registration drives, you eliminate Special Registration Deputies.
And you negate as many of your opponents' votes as you can through blatant and gross gerrymandering.
OK, so you've locked-in as much of an advantage for your party as you can through voting law changes. You have neutered their big donors. You've tipped the playing field to an unbelievable advantage through shameless gerrymandering. Now what?
You attract as many political contributions as possible by courting big-money lobbyists. You please the NRA through an array of all-guns-all-the-time-anywhere laws. You gain the gratitude of the school privatization lobby by starving public schools and expanding school vouchers statewide. You elate the WMC by implementing a series of anti-worker laws. And you change the state rules by which lobbyist money is regulated.
But lobbyist money is not enough. You need to get corporate and individual donations, too. You abolish your Commerce Department and replace it with a public/private organization. Away from public scrutiny, this group can offer unvetted loans and tax giveaways to your corporate donors. And to reward individual donors, you can give away state jobs to their relatives. However, first you need to eliminate with the state civil service system.
Since you can never have enough money, you rewrite state law to allow corporations to donate directly to your party and campaign. While you are at it, you allow outside groups to spend unlimited amounts of untraceable money to support your election. You allow yourself to directly coordinate with them on how to spend that money.
Whenever vast amounts of money are involved, there is always the chance of the occasional slip-up. You don't want to end-up behind bars. A corrupt State Supreme Court might not always be able to bail you out. You had better change some laws. You make it much more difficult to investigate any alleged wrongdoing.
You end John Doe investigations for lawbreaking by politicians. And you abolish that darned independent GAB and replace it with a toothless board headed by people you appoint. No investigation of legislators will be allowed to go forward unless your fellow legislators approve it.
Yes, if you completely stack the deck, you might be able to keep this great job the rest of your life. Forget the people who elected you. Forget the tradition of clean government in Wisconsin. So what if this all leads to the most corrupt state government in the nation? You've got yours. That is all that matters.
(originally published by Paul Adair in Germantown NOW, Just Sayin' blog, October 20, 2015)
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