The Democratic state senators who removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the State of Wisconsin were free to avail themselves of the existing rules of law in order to protect the citizens they represent. Their leader by virtue of being the Majority Leader of the Senate, State Senator Fitzgerald, stirred and finally overwhelmed by the passions of the day, including his passion to make the expropriation of the rights of workers for the state into law, took advantage of their absence, among other things, to have them declared in contempt of the Senate – that is, to be outlaws.
I say, that was the first, anti-collegial, act of outlawry of a now proven outlaw – one who is willing and eager to ignore and act outside the rules and limits of law to obtain what his unbounded passions drive him to obtain.
It got worse.
His second act of outlawry was secretly to redraw the law, that his rivals had had no choice but to flee the state to avert passing, in a way that their flight made no difference to its passage. To do this, in his outlawry, he overreached the rules of law that govern the passage of laws, that is, the very manner in which the legislative branch of government is supposed to function.
Let me say, at first I thought this was the Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker’s idea. But now I see it could only have come from the brain of a political criminal – if there were political crimes in Wisconsin the way there were in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. Whatever else he is, the Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker is no political criminal.
When this second act of political outlawry was followed by a third, the boldest yet, because in it he attempted to impose his passionate will on the decisions of a branch of government over which he has not even the shadow of authority, that is the judicial branch, I finally realized who and what the people of Wisconsin were dealing with. The outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald attempted to confound the orders of the court, by inducing a minion of the legislative branch to perform a seemingly harmless, ministerial act, and then presenting the result to the executive as if it actually made a difference in the legal position of things.
But it only worked for a little while. The Governor-of-Part-of-Us Walker pulled back when he realized, I should say, when he was finally properly advised – and not, at least not at first, by his own Attorney General Van Hollen – that to act as the outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald urged him was to put himself outside the law.
And so the outlaw State Senator Fitzgerald was stopped short of corrupting the third branch of government, and adding the executive to the list of the victims of his lawless passions.
I post this again in my new blog, consistently with its theme, as a warning to the people about what to expect, and guard against, from The Outlaw.
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