Republican majorities in the Wisconsin legislature gerrymandered the state so badly that even this Supreme Court gagged on the result. In addition, two seats in the state legislature came open and Walker was required by law to call special elections to fill them. Given the pasting Republicans have taken in similar elections around the country, this did not fill Walker and his pet legislature with either optimism or glee. So, he simply refused to call the elections.
Last week, however, a judge that Walker appointed told him to get the Koch Brothers’ mitts off his puppet strings and call the elections. This occasioned a week of huffing and blowing all throughout the capitol in Madison. The legislature has before it a bill that would eliminate the special elections on the grounds that the Republicans might lose them. (I’m paraphrasing here.) Meanwhile, Walker appealed the previous court’s decision and, on Wednesday, another court in Dane County slapped him down.
Walker has apparently decided to not push the matter further and to schedule the elections. But this morning he had a Trump-style twitter hissy fit. Allegra Kirkland writes at TPM:
In a Thursday morning tweetstorm, the Republican governor blamed “liberals from Washington, D.C.†and Holder, whose national redistricting group sued Walker to force him to schedule the races.
“Obama Attorney General Eric Holder and his Washington, D.C.-based special interest group are behind the legal push to force Wisconsin taxpayers to pay for special elections for seats that will be filled in a few months in the normal elections,†Walker wrote.
In subsequent tweets, Walker claimed Holder’s National Redistricting Foundation had only intervened to boost its profile and raise money ahead of the fall midterms.
However, Eric Holder didn’t hand down the court decisions.