Free Republic

Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers said Sunday he’s not optimistic that outgoing governor Scott Walker will veto bills approved by the Republican-dominated Legislature that would limit the new governor’s power. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Evers said he talked by telephone with Walker recently and appealed to him to veto the legislation, but that Walker was noncommittal. Evers, who will be sworn in Jan. 7 after narrowly defeating the two-term Republican last month, said Wisconsin voters did not elect him to fight over administrative powers with the GOP legislative majority. He said the lame-duck legislation approved by lawmakers after...

Former Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) penned an op-ed Tuesday calling for the Senate to be abolished and for elections to be publicly funded. Dingell, who represented Michigan in the House for over 59 years, wrote for the Atlantic a series of suggestions to address the "unprecedented cynicism about the nobility of public service itself." The former lawmaker noted that in 1958 a survey from the University of Michigan found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” In 2017, the same study conducted by the Pew Research...

--snip-- Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote. Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.

House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned California’s ballot-counting process after Democrats were able to flip several GOP-held seats.The state’s election system “defies logic to me,” he said during an interview with the Washington Post’s Paul Kane. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have, I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.”“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he continued. “This election system they have — I can’t begin to...