A week after insisting she had enough signatures, the woman organizing a recall campaign against Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced Monday her effort had failed.
"It is with a heavy heart we announce that after proofing and what came in over the weekend we have fallen short. We do not have enough signatures to turn in," organizer Misty Polewczynski wrote in a Facebook post.
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The recall effort faced blowback from Republicans who said they should be focused on President Donald Trump's reelection bid, not a longshot recall of a governor who is polling well.
Republicans also didn’t like this recall effort because they are well aware that state law allows someone under threat of a recall to raise unlimited amounts of funds. This is another reason Scott Walker kept delaying the recall vote against him for months so he could continue filling his bulging coffers (along with making sure that the states colleges and universities were on summer break so students couldn’t vote). And Evers has used this time effectively, too, to raise funds.
Republicans are still very, very angry and upset that they lost control of all statewide offices in Wisconsin in 2018 when Scott Walker and his band of Not So Merry Men were shown the door after 8 years of failure. They were soooo angry that they spent the lame duck session in 2018 removing most of the Governors’ powers by making him come begging to the Republican dominated Legislature in order to do anything. Walker happily signed all that legislation in private.
They’re soooo angry about the Executive orders issued by Evers to control the pandemic in Wisconsin that they ran to their Republican dominated courts for relief they couldn’t achieve in the Legislature. Time after time the courts issued injunctive relief to them when they asked by overruling those Executive orders. After all, they said they told the Governor “no” very firmly when he came begging them for legislation to keep Wisconsinites alive. When called to special session by the Governor to consider legislation for this emergency, they gavel in and gavel out in 20 seconds. They haven’t met since April and have neither considered or passed any legislation.
It’s sporadic local restrictions and precautions put in place by responsible businesses that have been keeping us safer along with a fairly new statewide mask mandate (which the courts didn’t overturn). However, there’s no enforcement mechanism as you can tell when you go out. Some businesses ignore the restrictions when customers come in maskless and don’t follow social distancing guidelines. Others do an incredible job of keeping their customers and employees as safe as possible.
And Donald tRumps superspreader events keep the Covid spiking in Wisconsin and Republican sycophants still believing that the pandemic is “fake news” or “over”. He was here the last 2 Saturdays, October 17 and 24. Ivanka swooped in on Tuesday, October 20 after Eric was here Monday, October 12. Trump will be back here again on Tuesday. Small wonder we’re spiking so badly we’ve had to open a field hospital about a mile from my house.
The Covid spike here is so bad that contract tracing is currently futile.
The math is dismal. Many Wisconsin residents continue to gather, often without a mask, as cases surge, so a person who tests positive might report 10 or more close contacts who need to be reached quickly. Multiply that by 3,400, and the task becomes Sisyphean: close to 40,000 people for the state's little more than a thousand tracers to reach with each new day.
Powerful business lobbies, particularly the Tavern League which is currently running negative ads about Covid restrictions, are fiercely complaining that the state isn’t fully open for them to operate. They, along with Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce, are powerful lobbies and very heavy political hitters. They help keep Republicans in power with campaign cash and plenty of dark money attack ads on Democrats so the GOP serves them faithfully.
Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce, some Chambers of Commerce, and Republican legislators have been fighting an effort to release the names of businesses linked with Covid cases citing “patient confidentiality”. They have filed a lawsuit and even got a judge to issue a 5 day injunction. Media reports that information is now taking months to receive from state officials as a result.
A lack of information has helped keep workers, area residents and the public in the dark about the extent of the outbreaks and the risks they face. Many workers at food processing plants with outbreaks told the Journal Sentinel they learned about cases at their companies through coworkers.
State and local officials are redoubling their contact tracing efforts, but are hampered by Republican politicians and business groups who continue to turn Covid precautions into a political litmus test.
Perhaps part of me doesn’t care if tRump supporters and Covid deniers get sick (karma), but I DO care that they’re likely the ones going maskless into a stores or restaurant for where they’ll give it to employees and other customers, infect their friends and families at large maskless gatherings, infect their kids who spread it at school, and then infect health care workers when they need care.
Most states aren’t handling it and the ones that are get foiled by the fact that viruses ignore borders, rules, laws, insults, and tweets. They just spread and we need to stop helping them do this by failing to have national and international laws to protect us and others. Until then we’ll just keep seeing higher case numbers no matter how much Republicans try to ignore what’s happening and hide the data.