Wisconsin Assembly speaker Robin Vos is so far right that it’s off the scale. Yesterday, Wisconsin MAGAt crackpots launched a recall petition against him. They claim, among other things:
that he’s too anti-Trump
that he hasn’t impeached Wisconsin’s top election official, Meagan Wolf
Last year, shockingly, the MAGAts nearly defeated him in a primary:
Vos has represented the southern half of Racine County since 2005 and has been Assembly speaker since 2013. He was happy to be a lap dog for Scott Walker working with him to weaken collective bargaining and unions in Wisconsin. After Tony Evers ousted Walker, Vos led the Assembly into complete opposition, unconstitutionally grabbing gubernatorial prerogatives and particularly blocking Evers’ efforts to increase the safety and accessibility of elections during the pandemic. He worked to overturn the election, hiring a crackpot extremist, Michael Gableman, to investigate— something that wasted over $2.5 million in taxpayer money for no reason at all. In the end, even Vos was disgusted by Gableman’s conspiracy-theory nonsense and fired him, albeit not before Gableman endorsed Adam Steen, Vos’ primary opponent.
Pleasing the QAnon fringe, Vos did all he could to hinder public health measures to mitigate the pandemic, opposing mask mandates and vaccine requirements, even by private businesses. Vos is personally responsible for the deaths of as many as 16,723 Wisconsinites. He should be ousted for that— also tried, convicted and executed for all those needless deaths.
Also he’s not being recalled for taking bribes from lobbyists nor for working to deregulate the payday loan industry nor for his efforts to block Medicare expansion. Due to Vos’ efforts, Wisconsin is one of only 10 states (Alabama,Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming being the other 9), which has resulted in a higher uninsured rate than the national average, leaving many residents without access to affordable healthcare and forcing hospitals to incur much higher costs due to uncompensated care for the uninsured.
But none of those are the reasons Vos may be recalled. Quite the contrary. The lunatics trying to recall him are doing it because he wasn’t extreme enough! Writing for the Wisconsin State Journal yesterday, Alexander Shur reported that the extremists behind the recall effort— MAGAts Matthew Snorek, Jay Schroeder, Adam Steen and Harry Wait— “now have 60 days to collect about 6,850 signatures if they hope to force a June vote” on Vos. This also allows Vos to collect unlimited money, ostensibly to defend himself.
Not surprisingly, “Vos called the recall effort ‘a waste of time, resources and effort,’ conducted by people who failed to oust him in the 2022 election. ‘While the backers of this recall effort want to focus on the past, I am going to keep my eyes focused on the future,’ he said. ‘We have elections to win in the fall. We have an aggressive spring agenda focused on returning our surplus to taxpayers and making key investments in priority areas.’ Trump has repeatedly referred to Vos as a ‘RINO’… Vos has repeatedly criticized Trump for rehashing the 2020 presidential election. He has said the former president is bad for the party, pointing out that Republicans were far more successful in statewide elections before Trump’s 2016 presidential race.”
In an official statement Vos he was focused on the remainder of the legislative session and that he is “confident that my friends, neighbors and supporters from Racine County will stand with me and ensure this effort fails to gain any real traction. The effort today is no surprise since the people involved cannot seem to get over any election in which their preferred candidate doesn’t win. This recall is a waste of time, resources and effort. I’m proud of my record and the accomplishments that we’ve achieved this year.”
These MAGAts going after Vos are extremely stupid and Democrats should do everything they can to make sure they win their efforts to replace Vos, who, unfortunately, isn’t stupid.
Randy Bryce ran for Congress in a district that included Vos' own gerrymandered seat. "The guy is such a putz," he told me, getting right to the crux of the matter without beating around the bush. "If the MAGA crowd that’s trying to recall Robin Vos wasn’t trying to get someone just as bad into the state legislature I might help. Unfortunately Vos has drawn himself into a very safely gerrymandered district. If there’s one person that needs to go it would be him. He’s the kind of guy who walks up to a new GOP member and tells them not to think-- we have enough bosses. I remember when we recalled Scott Walker during the winter. It wasn’t fun but we were determined to do it. We gathered 1,000,000 signatures. I can’t see that level of dedication to get rid of Vos. Hopefully I’m wrong as there is nothing more that I’d love to see than Vos looking for another way to make peoples’ lives miserable."
State Sen. Chris Larson, running for reelection in a district just north of Vos’, put it like this: “Arch conservative Robin Vos is about to learn the hard way what many establishment Republicans refused to learn the easy way: you'll never be able to appease the raviging cult that Donald Trump has created for himself unless your name is Donald Trump. As JFK said in his inaugural address, ‘those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.’”
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