The GOP Is Scared of Democracy. Just Look at Wisconsin.

Democracy dies in darkness because Republicans wait until after dark to kill it.

That’s what happened last night, and before sunrise this morning, in Wisconsin. The state’s GOP-run state legislature used an extraordinary session to strip powers from the newly elected Democratic governor and attorney general and roll back voting rights.

When they unveiled the bills, Wisconsin’s Republican legislative chiefs — Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald — wrote in a statement that “The legislature is the most representative branch in government,” as though the bills were a defense of democracy.

The truth is, Wisconsin’s GOP power grab took place precisely because the state GOP is afraid of democracy. That fear is etched all over the bills — dubbed the “Wisconsin power grab” — that lawmakers just rammed through the statehouse.

First, some critical context: in Wisconsin, the legislature is not, in fact, the most representative branch. It’s the least. In terms of vote totals, they’re the losers of the 2018 elections. Republican State Assembly candidates only racked up 46 percent of the vote, compared to 54 percent for Democrats. But because of extreme gerrymandering, they wound up with 64 percent of the State Assembly seats. In fact, there’s a chance that the gerrymandered map will be thrown out by the Supreme Court next year.

But gerrymandering can’t stop Democrats from winning statewide races. Perhaps that’s why Wisconsin Republicans just moved to stomp out early voting. Wisconsin counties set their own early voting rules, and the biggest cities — Milwaukee and Madison — allowed early voting for six weeks. Republican lawmakers claimed that this rankled their (often rural) constituents. But rather than expanding early voting to all parts of the state, they decided to limit the early vote everywhere to two weeks, in an obvious move to prevent heavily Democratic areas from repeating the high turnout that just…

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