Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Done deal, if it took two years.

Cap Times

To read is to weep, but Charles Pierce nails it—

We have been concentrating a little heavily for a number of reasons on the truly atrocious mining bill that finally passed the Wisconsin Assembly last night. The first is that it is yet another indication that Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, plans to run for president, so it's a good idea to judge him by his works. The second is that the bill is an almost perfect example of the conception held by modern conservatives — which is to say, Republicans — of the way things are supposed to work, and an almost perfect example of the conservative idea of self-government as public oligarchy. And the last one is that it truly is an atrocious bill, being, at the same time, an environmental catastrophe, a staggering economic giveaway, and a deliberate and obvious offense against the idea of a political commonwealth.

The GOP rigged the bill to head off legal challenges by openly admitting that mines devastate the environment. As in a Republican legislator's words: "If the law is challenged and ends up in court, the judge needs to know it was the Legislature's intent to allow adverse (environmental) impacts."

Wisconsin has been a test case since Walker took office. It's always been part of a much larger plan; in Pierce's words—

This is raw state capitalism at its most egregious, and it demonstrates clearly that the conservative movement has plans that go back in history beyond rolling back the Great Society or the New Deal. They are after every progressive advance made since the end of the 19th Century. This isn't something that the conservative movement is trying to hide. In the middle of his filibuster the other day, Rand Paul threw a bouquet at the Lochner decision, the horrid 1906 ruling by the Supreme Court that hamstrung for decades the ability of workers to organize. The Citizens United ruling codified the corporate-personhood heresy that arose out of clerical chicanery in Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, and then CU itself was used to strike down state laws of that same era corporate campaign contributions in places like Montana. On the fringes, Glenn Beck made a fortune tracing the Great Progressive Conspiracy through the cobwebbed canyons of his mind, and the likes of Jonah Goldberg got rich explaining how Adolf Hitler really was nothing more than a proto-Green Party activist with an air force and submarines. Teddy Roosevelt didn't have three votes in the Wisconsin Assembly this week, let alone Bob LaFollette or FDR. They are playing for a newer, and far more permanent Gilded Age, and it is not coming about by accident.

Wisconsin had perhaps the strongest participatory democracy in the country, as seen when tens of thousands showed at legislators' doors, two years ago.

Which only showed that the public needed to be shut out.

AP/Andy Manis