Reblog: “Disastrous Duck by Wisconsin Supreme Court! Walker Off Scot-Free?”

Our governor Scott Walker gets away with shady activity which violates state law.

This kind of thing makes us wonder who really is running our state, the people or corporations?

And Walker and his cronies recently made it even harder to keep them honest, by removing various watchdogs over state government.  They didn’t like the powers of the John Doe probes, so they removed them.  When our innovative Government Accountability Board did its job and Walker suffered, he and his cronies rolled us back to what we had when this crap went down.

The courts have failed us yet again.

Quote:

The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to take the Wisconsin John Doe campaign finance case is a major setback for democracy, transparency, and accountability.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was flagrantly skirting 40 years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent on campaign finance by coordinating with outside groups, as the recent article in the Guardian amply demonstrated. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s corrupt decision in July 2015 to shut down the John Doe II investigation of Walker was based on a blatant misreading of U.S. Supreme Court rulings on this subject.

So I’m surprised and severely disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court did not take the case. It has an obligation, however, to revisit this issue of coordination between candidates and outside groups in the near future because the precedent that Walker and the Wisconsin Supreme Court have now set is disastrous. It undermines the ability of legislatures to impose meaningful limits on donations to candidates or to require adequate disclosure of donations – both of which are keys to a well-functioning democracy.

–Matthew Rothschild, posted here