Last week’s Isthmus featured an article about the recall effort, which is in full swing this month in Wisconsin. After Governor Walker’s controversial Budget Repair Bill and the ensuing protests last spring, the state has been divided and both Republican and Democratic senators are being recalled for their roles in the fiasco.
Tuesday was our first recall election, and thankfully (to me), Democratic Senator Dave Hansen beat his challenger and retained his seat. Two more Democrats have been recalled, and six Republicans. If any of these succeed, it will be a big deal: in the history of the country, only 6 state legislators have ever been successfully recalled.
If the Democrats flip at least three seats, we’ll gain a majority in the Senate. Since Republicans currently control all branches of state government, we are working hard to make this happen.
The Isthmus article was excellent, and if you want more background on the recalls, I suggest reading it before this post. But what I’d like to write about is just one line from the article: “State Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville)…worries that the only casualties of the recalls will be moderate legislators who represent districts that are relatively split politically.”
In particular, it’s the moderates who are being recalled. Activists from both parties have calculated that moderates in the other party are most vulnerable, so in both parties, these are the senators who will face the consequences of the whole party’s actions.
I’ve been a part of all this. I helped to recall Republican Senator Luther Olsen, who is in a split district. From what I’ve heard, Olsen has been a good senator, a moderate senator. I feel bad about this. It pains me to challenge a person who has made an effort to reach across the aisle, something I strongly support. And yet, it felt right to collect signatures for Olsen’s recall because I wanted to send a message to him and other Republicans across the country that his anti-union vote had not been okay.
As I read the article, I wrestled with this again.
An Argument for Punishing Moderate Senators
In a way, I thought, isn’t it actually fair for the recalls to target moderates like Olsen?
Both the Republican and Democratic recall efforts are responses to extreme action taken by legislators. To me, Olsen’s extreme action was voting alongside all other Senate Republicans for the Budget Repair Bill, the union-busting bill that had bitterly divided the state.
Whether or not the bill was a good one, I felt it was rammed down the throats of the voters in a way that no bill should be. It erased fifty years of legislation without warning, and efforts were made to pass it rapidly, without debate (see the earliest posts from this blog).
To vote for the bill when there’d been so little vetting of it, and when it so clearly infuriated so much of Wisconsin, struck me as a rotten action on the part of all the Republican senators. But in a way, moderates like Olsen were even more villainous than their colleagues in voting for this bill.
Olsen is from a split district, which means he betrayed approximately half of his constituents by casting his controversial vote. That means in his case, his vote was especially undemocratic, depriving his own constituents of their voice.
After the bill was passed, it was stalled in court for months, during which time the Republican-controlled legislature could easily have passed it again. Despite all their rhetoric about wanting to fix the state budget quickly, however, they didn’t pass it again. Instead, they waited for the courts to make their ruling. Why?
There’s been much speculation that they were afraid to re-pass the bill because of the recall effort. Voting for the bill a second time might make senators like Olsen even more vulnerable to recall. Well, I thought, if you’re afraid your constituents will recall you for voting a second time on a bill, then maybe you shouldn’t have voted for it the first time around!
Other senators who come from solidly Republican districts were on more solid ground—their votes were likely in keeping with the majority of their constituents’ wishes. But Olsen was skating on much thinner ice.
This same reasoning holds true on the other side of the coin. The three Democratic senators are being recalled for their heroic—ahem, extreme—action of fleeing the state to stall the passage of the bill in February and March.
For Democrats like Fred Risser, my senator, this action was exactly what the majority of the constituents wanted, although we didn’t know we wanted it until he was already safely in Illinois. But for other senators who represent more split districts, this action was more questionable.
And that’s why I sometimes feel these recalls of moderates are actually justified. Our legislators should represent us, even when the party is pressuring them in a certain direction. Isn’t their job to represent constituents’ wishes, not toe the party line?
Moderate Republicans like Olsen shouldn’t have voted for the Budget Repair Bill. The onus was on them to keep their party from swinging wildly to the right, and they caved. And although it pains me to say it, by the same token, the moderate Democrats should not have fled the state—although I am forever grateful that they did.
…But If We Recall All the Moderates, Where Will We Be?
So that’s my logic for why it actually makes sense to punish moderate senators. But that’s not the whole story.
A recent episode of “This American Life” was largely about Wisconsin’s political divide, which has widened into a chasm since Governor Walker’s Budget Repair Bill. The episode was called “A House Divided” and is a great way to learn how the bill and ensuing protests have affected the state.
One of the main effects is the loss of diplomacy among legislators and citizens, and the loss of moderation, compromise, and dialogue. Here was my favorite quote:
Talking to Wisconsin politicians about what’s happening, I often got this nagging feeling that this is all very disorienting… They built their careers in an environment where diplomacy matters, and suddenly, they’re fighting for those careers in a place where the rules have changed.
The thing about a big move, like Walker’s—it can take a place where people value meeting in the middle, compromise, and turn it into a place where everything is black and white. And in a black and white world, the people…who like gray, they become outcasts. And they risk getting attacked from both sides.
I didn’t just get that feeling from Democrats… I heard it from moderate Republicans, too. [Republican State Senator Luther Olsen] said when Walker unveiled his controversial legislation, Luther reached out to his Republican colleagues to offer a compromise, an olive branch. But there was so much pressure from Walker that the middle ground vanished.
Listening to the episode made me better understand the dilemma Olsen and other moderates faced. They walk a constant tightrope between appealing to their voters and supporting their party, which places enormous pressure on them when they deviate. Forced to choose this spring, they had no good options.
So maybe the real problem isn’t their cowardice in refusing to toe the party line. Maybe the problem is the parties themselves, which create this black-and-white culture that abhors compromise.
The result of all these recalls will be to remove some of the moderates from the legislature, on one or both sides. Assuming that happens, I hope they’ll be replaced with other moderates who’ll represent their districts—even when pressured not to by their parties.
But I’m worried that that won’t be the case.
