Bad Moon Rising edition

The month of March is rapidly drawing to a close, and in some parts of the country, maybe it’s “going out like a lamb,” as the kids say.

But no matter where you are, March is definitely ending with a full moon. A blue moon, to be precise, and the second one this year.

Also, it’s the last blue moon (a second full moon within a single calendar month) we’ll see until 2020 (on Halloween night, to be precise—oooOOOooo spooky!).

It’s super fun to blame the full moon for all kinds of things, from exacerbated medical conditions and increased births to car accidents and lycanthropy.

But studies have shown that the notion that full moons produce these and other effects to be false and likely the product of good old-fashioned confirmation bias—when we focus on data points that confirm our beliefs and ignore those pesky facts that don’t fit.

He Sees Trouble On The Way: For all his myriad flaws as a governor and a politician, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker can’t be considered guilty of such an unrealistic way of looking at the current state of politics. He identified the consistent trend of Democratic special election wins and over-performances in state legislative races this cycle and decided that maybe he didn’t so much want to hold any more special elections to fill vacant Republican seats.

• Wisconsin judges shut that nonsense down for good this week when they stymied a GOP plan to outlaw these elections altogether and forced Walker to finally call these specials to avoid violating a court order.

Some background:

• When Walker quietly declared—in that week between Christmas and New Year’s when normal folks are less likely to pay attention to political news—he was going to leave two Republican seats empty for over a year, the special election trend line was obvious, and it indisputably favored Democrats.
  • In the 70 Democrat-vs.-Republican special elections held (by that point) since Trump’s election, Democrats in 2017 were outperforming Clinton’s numbers by 10 percent, on average, and they were even outperforming Obama’s 2012 numbers by an average of 7 percent.
  • Democrats had flipped 12 seats from red to blue in statehouse specials in 2017, and Democrats had flipped another 19 seats in the Virginia and New Jersey general elections.

So yeah, it’s not hard to see why Walker didn’t want to hold these special elections.

Losing seats sucks!

• Walker got even more scared when Democrat Patty Schachtner flipped the historically and solidly Republican SD-10 in January (as demonstrated by his little Twitter freakout right after the election). And it’s pretty easy to figure out why.
  • Both seats Walker refused to fill (SD-01 and AD-42) voted for Trump, 56-39 and 55-40, respectively.
  • But in 2012, Romney carried SD-01 only 52-47, and Obama actually won AD-42 by a 51-48 margin.
    • For frame of reference, that SD-10 seat Democrats flipped in November? Trump won 55-38 there. 
    • These seats aren’t going to be easy pickups by any means, but they’re quite solidly within the realm of electoral possibility for Democrats this cycle.

Not being represented in your state capitol for over a year is extremely lame.

• So a couple of voters teamed up with the well-moneyed and well-lawyered crew at the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and sued to force Walker to hold special elections to fill these seat and get these good Wisconsinites some representation.
• Late last week, Walker-appointed Judge Josann Reynolds told the governor he was in violation of the very plain meaning of state law and ordered him to call the special elections by high noon on Thursday, March 29.

Well, we all know what Republicans do when a court rules against them.

• They cry foul or attack the judges or attempt to undermine the decision or the court itself or all of the above.
• In this case, Walker and his GOP cohorts in the state legislature called a special session, set to convene Tuesday, April 4, to pass a bill that would effectively nullify the court’s order and prevent special legislative elections from being held in even-numbered years ever again.
  • The whole scheme was a pretty obvious and egregious end-run around both democracy AND the rule of law.
    • And Wisconsinites knew it: Over the course of just three days, over 3,300 Wisconsin members of the Daily Kos community sent more than 6,500 letters to their own Assembly members and state Senators denouncing this move.
• But Republicans had a timing problem.
  • Once the special elections were called, outlawing all even-year specials in the future wouldn’t matter—there’s no un-ringing the election bell, so to speak.
  • And the court’s ruling demanded Walker call those special elections Thursday, well ahead of the legislature’s special session to pass their bogus anti-democracy bill on Tuesday.
• Walker asked the judge—whom Republicans publicly trashed after she ruled against them—to pretty please extend his deadline for calling the specials to next Thursday, April 6, so the legislature would have plenty of time to outlaw them.
  • Another judge, substituting for Reynolds, issued a pointed rebuke as he refused the governor’s request.
  • Walker then appealed to a higher court, which issued a pointed rebuke as it refused the governor's request.
  • Walker, likely fearing yet another pointed rebuke, decided against appealing the decision to the state Supreme Court and called the special elections a few hours in advance of Thursday’s deadline.
    • The special elections for Assembly District 42 and Senate District 1 will be held on June 12, with primaries on May 15.

Fun fact! There’s already a Democrat running in SD-01! His name is Caleb Frostman, and he enjoys hunting. Like, a lot.

But wait, there’s more good news on the Republicans-pissed-off-about-a-judicial-ruling-so-they-want-to-burn-it-all-down front!

• Twelve Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania jumped on the impeachment bandwagon last week and introduced resolutions in the state House to impeach four of the five Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court—the same four justices who ruled the state’s congressional district map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and required it be replaced with fairer lines.
  • This threat was quite real, too.
    • Republican need a simple majority to pass impeachment resolutions in the House, and they need two-thirds supermajority to actually impeach those justices in the Senate—both of which they have, thanks to their extremely gerrymandered state legislative maps.
• But Pennsylvania’s House majority leader—who determines which bills are and aren’t heard in that chamber—has effectively doused that fire for the time being, asserting that, while he sure wasn’t a fan of the court’s gerrymandering decision, “disagreement over the outcome of any particular case should not be grounds for impeachment.”

You don't say!

We’ll see what happens when the state House reconvenes on April 9, but assume GOP impeachment effort dead—at least for now.

Read the rest of this week's edition here.

Sign up for This Week in Statehouse Action here.