Do Republicans Have Secret COVID-19 Plan?

Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald.

Your warning lights should be flashing bright red, Bucky:

Because we’re told that Republican leaders, along with Wisconsin’s big-business-without-any-worker-representation’ special interests are working on a plan to roll out should — make that when — the state Supreme Court lets them wrest control of the government’s emergency powers from Gov. Tony Evers.

You can bet the plan is already sitting on secret servers within a keystroke of the leaders’ computers to further empower businesses to dismiss workers who resist a quick return to workplaces reopened even before Donald Trump‘s corporately-obeisant White House says its safe.

The GOP-run Legislature already passed one bill that denied some first responders an easy path to COVID-19 treatment and compensation after the heavyweight WMC got GOP legislators to add the anti-worker  provision to a bill distributing emergency federal dollars.

You have to assume business interests and GOP ideologues are going to plan for additional financial and managerial restrictions on public employees even if that steps on the Governor’s prerogatives – – about which Scott Fitzgerald and Robin Vos could not care less.

Because they’ve been working to diminish, disrespect and otherwise undermine and ignore Evers since he had the temerity to oust Walker from the Governor-for-Life lock on the office which Republicans assumed was his by right.

We’ve seen what happens in Wisconsin when Walkerite corporatist tools get together privately and make plans.

Remember when:

* Scott Walker sprung Act 10, calling his secretly-drafted radical rewrite of public employee rights, wages, benefit funding and 50 years of state history and law merely “modest, modest requests.”

* Ditto for the secretly-crafted GOP gerrymander that continues to overly-populate the Legislature with rightwing Republicans who are only too happy to pretend they are entitled to that representation with all the power it delivers.

* Not to mention the 2018 lame-duck package of bills Republicans had ready to roll out and over the incoming Democratic Governor and Attorney General Josh Kaul.

We’ve seen this movie before. It only ends well for the GOP.

Nothing comes from quietly-crafted Republican legislative measures except fewer dollars and rights in the hands of working people and greater powers accumulated by GOP legislators to serve their donors and partisan advantages.

James Rowen, a former journalist and mayoral staffer in Milwaukee and Madison, writes a regular blog, The Political Environment.