Dane County (WI) Supervisor Jenni Dye: A leader in the fight for non-partisan redistricting

Jenni Dye, a member of the Dane County (WI) Board of Supervisors representing Supervisory District 33, which includes rural areas and some suburban areas of the City of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, chairs one of the most powerful Dane County Board subcommittees: the redistricting subcommittee of the county board’s executive committee.

Instead of waiting until after the 2020 U.S. Census, which is a little less than 4 1/2 years away, to pick and choose her own constituents by redrawing her own district, Jenni is supporting a great idea: taking elected officials completely out of the Dane County redistricting process altogether and creating a non-partisan citizens’ redistricting commission:

As the Dane County Board prepares for redistricting in 2021, supervisors are leaning toward having community members take on more power in the process than they have in decades.

The Redistricting Subcommittee of the Executive Committee of the County Board is tentatively recommending the county establish an impartial redistricting commission consisting of only citizen members — no elected officials.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” said District 33 Supervisor Jenni Dye, who chairs the redistricting subcommittee. “We need to have a process where the people of Dane County are sure that they are electing their supervisors and not that supervisors are choosing their voters.”

I strongly believe that elected officials in this country should not have the power to literally pick and choose their own constituents by redrawing the districts which they run for public office in. Having ordinary citizens, not elected officials, redraw legislative districts, whether it be local, state, or federal legislative districts, is, if done correctly, a far more fairer method of drawing legislative districts.

If only there were far more elected officials who, like Jenni Dye, care about the integrity of the political system, America would be far better off.

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When it comes to fighting against Wisconsin Republicans’ push to dismantle good government, Dianne Hesselbein leads

Wisconsin Republicans are spending virtually all of their time trying to dismantle what little remains of Wisconsin’s once-proud tradition of good government and enact a ton of blatantly partisan legislation. One of those blatantly partisan pieces of legislation is legislation that would dismantle Wisconsin’s civil service system and allow Republicans like Governor Scott Walker to install political cronies in every kind of Wisconsin state government job that you can think of. In a recent op-ed in the Madison, Wisconsin-based newspaper The Cap Times, State Rep. Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), described the Republican plan for dismantling Wisconsin’s civil service system:

The new Republican law will introduce an element of fear in the workplace. New employees will face a full year of probation instead of the current 60 days. (It was to be two years, but the bill’s authors started to feel a chill and backed off.) During probation, new hires will be in a free-fire zone and can be fired at will. If there are layoffs, seniority will not count. Raises will become individual bonuses awarded to the favored few.

Hiring and firing will be controlled by the governor’s political arm — the Department of Administration — not the home agency. Employees will no longer have the assurance that, so long as they show up and do their job well, their job will be secure. Now, for the first time since the Progressives created it in 1905, they will have to worry about political factors.

There’s plenty of other odious pieces of legislation that Republicans want to enact in Wisconsin when it comes to dismantling good government. These include replacing Wisconsin’s non-partisan government watchdog with two separate partisan state commissions, as well as rewriting Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws to allow more money to flow into the political system and allow campaign donors to not disclose who employs them.

I’m glad that someone like Dianne Hesselbein is strongly opposing the Republicans’ efforts to make Wisconsin more like Illinois, a state rife with political corruption and cronyism.

The special election that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin doesn’t want you to know about

There is absolutely nothing on the website or social media pages of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) that I have been able to find regarding an upcoming special election in the Waukesha-based 33rd State Senate District of Wisconsin, where Democratic candidate Sherryll Shaddock is running against Republican candidate Chris Kapenga.

While the DPW is trying to ignore the fact that there’s an election scheduled to take place on July 21st, Sherryll Shaddock is the Democratic nominee in an upcoming state senate special election in Wisconsin. Shaddock is running against Chris Kapenga, who, as a state representative, tried to work with corporate Democrats like Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele to prevent Wisconsin counties from enacting living wage ordinances in order to boost their economies. Shaddock, on the other hand, supports fully funding public education, restoring Wisconsin’s once-proud tradition of good government, protecting Wisconsin’s environment, allowing women to make their own decisions regarding their reproductive health, and protecting local control over matters that are best left to local governments to deal with.

While it would be glorious if Shaddock were to win election to the Wisconsin State Senate, she doesn’t need to win the election in order to secure a moral victory for her party. Given how wildly unpopular Republicans have become in Wisconsin in recent months, and given that the 33rd Senate District is about 20 percentage points more Republican than Wisconsin as a whole is, if Shaddock were to secure at least 35% of the vote, then Democrats and progressives in Wisconsin can easily make the case that the Republican agenda is very unpopular in Wisconsin.

I strongly encourage voters in the 33rd Senate District of Wisconsin to show up at the polls on July 21st and vote for Sherryll Shaddock for Wisconsin State Senate.

What Democrats here in the United States can learn from a major progressive victory in Alberta

The Rachel Notley-led Alberta New Democratic Party (Alberta NDP), which ran on a platform consisting nearly entirely of progressive ideas and values, is projected by CBC News to win a majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, and, therefore, is projected to be the governing party in Alberta’s provincial government. Both the Canadian federal government and each Canadian province uses a parliamentary system to determine control of government.

The Alberta NDP’s platform is very progressive on nearly every issue they gave a position on in their platform, especially when one considers that the Canadian province of Alberta is about as right-wing as the U.S. state of Texas is. The NDP’s platform included planks supporting increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour, getting the undue influence of money out of politics, enacting stronger ethics laws, improving access to health care, investing in public education, raising income taxes on Alberta-based corporations and the wealthiest 10% of Albertans, investing in child care, providing for the safety and well-being of Albertan children and women, and, surprisingly for an oil-rich state, investing in renewable energy.

The NDP’s victory in Alberta speaks volumes about how the corrupt, corporate Democratic Party “leadership” here in the United States is failing progressives and the American people on many levels. Very few Democrats are willing to openly run as progressives, and, as a result, the Democratic Party often has trouble winning races outside of states and constituencies that strongly favor the Democrats to begin with. I would strongly encourage Democratic leaders to take a look at how the Alberta NDP won big in tonight’s provincial elections and use the NDP’s Alberta victory as a model to win back both houses of Congress, as well as many state and local offices.

If progressive-minded people can win in Alberta, progressive-minded people can win anywhere!