Madison's Capital Times newspaper ran a disturbing online dispatch over the weekend suggesting just how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has handled some of those in the crowds demonstrating against his further union-busting adventures. The news report describes how a pair of peaceful protesters were arrested at the Capitol Wednesday during a Wisconsin Senate hearing on the Republican Party's so-called "right-to-work" bill.
The pair, who like many others were kept from entering the hearing room to testify against the bill, were handcuffed, then, according to Cap Times reporter Steven Elbow, "taken to a Department of Administration (DOA) facility about a mile away and released without charges before being turned out with no gloves, no cash and no transportation back," despite having no winter coats and facing bone-chilling winter weather. A video of the arrest is available at the link above.
That account of Wisconsin state cops shipping protesters off to an undisclosed holding pen came out about the same time as The Guardian's report of a shadowy detention center the Chicago Police have created to handle their own collection of suspected enemies of the state.
One other noteworthy aspect of the Madison protest story: The detained woman is Kelly Albrecht, a demonstrator well known to Capitol Police and Wisconsin State Police. In 2012 she was the Democratic nominee who ran against state Rep. Robin Vos, a Republican who later became Assembly Majority Leader.
Albrecht said she was arrested when she went looking for a bathroom and state police officers ordered her to stay behind a cordon. Instead of being allowed to use the bathroom, she was handcuffed and -- without her winter jacket -- driven to the DOA facility a mile away. She and her fellow demonstrator were released an hour later without being charged and told to find their own way back. The pair eventually caught a city bus and returned to the Capitol. But not before they were frisked and Albrecht's purse searched for "contraband."
This latest incident of state police crossing the civil-rights Rubicon dovetails with Walker's campaign comments last week about how, if he could "handle" 100,000 protesters demonstrating against his anti-union law four years ago, he could handle ISIS terrorism in the Mideast.
And what do you know: In a strange and narrow sense, Walker makes a small, if skewed point. Because, based on the Cap Times dispatch, Walker is on a smaller scale acting pretty much as George W. Bush did in running roughshod over civil liberties, especially the rights of the accused (and, worse, the never accused).
The State and Capitol Police under Walker's ultimate control are more than ever handling "suspects" who oppose his policies with the same kind, if not degree, of
careless authoritarianism that Bush employed to handle alleged terrorists -- or people who just seemed to be in the general vicinity of terrorism and who were rounded up indiscriminately.
Both the Bush and Walker administrations identified a putative list of alleged and dangerous opponents, on what often have turned out to be flimsy legal grounds. Both have presided over operations in which cops or soldiers have dragged people to out-of-sight, out-of-mind detention facilities.
The only difference: Those captured under Bush's presidential watch have languished for years in foreign-based "rendition" or prison camps, on very rare occasion granted only the most grudging respect for their rights, when even under especially licentious military law, they have never been accused.
Whereas, under Walker's state government the past four years, reputed (and I emphasize that word) Wisconsin "troublemakers" who protest his policies in public are often arrested but released without being charged; or, when they are charged, often go free when prosecutors or courts throw out the cases. Which looks a lot more like harassment than law enforcement, like an attempt to stifle dissent by making free speech harder to express.
This is a cynical approach, especially given that it comes from the Walker political camp that complains bitterly about intrusions on its own free speech when merely questioned about its shady, secret, legally dubious campaign activities.
Thus, trampling civil liberties in the once-progressive Badger state seems Walker's best argument for declaring himself fit and able to tackle ISIS. That might resonate with
his fiery voter and patron base, but it leaves civil libertarians increasingly alarmed.
Much more below the puff of orange tear gas smoke. Follow along.
Even though the historically huge protests against Walker's assault on public employees four years ago have since withered, the protests never ended, with a regular
chorus of Solidarity singers meeting daily in the statehouse to share protest songs.
Many of the singers, along with reporters and in at least one case a Democratic legislator just trying to find his way to his office, have been arrested over the past several years and charged with various minor crimes like disorderly conduct or resisting an officer. But a state appeals court threw out many of the charges a year ago on constitutional free-speech grounds.
After the 2011 protests began, the Walker administration implemented unheard-of rules, for instance requiring all events in the Capitol or other state government buildings to obtain a hard-to-get permit (rather reminiscent of the strategy behind the GOP's Voter ID scheme). The Walker administration then issued a rule prohibiting anyone from merely watching any unpermitted event. Mind you, that passive act of watching was, by Team Walker's reckoning, illegal in a public building where -- thanks to other Wisconsin Republican "reforms" -- virtually anyone could legally carry a concealed handgun, though not always a camera.
Last week after Walker announced he'd sign an expected, so-called, "right to work" law limiting private employee unions in the state, a new wave of protests returned to Madison and other Wisconsin cities. So far those protests have "only" attracted thousands rather than six-figure crowds, so, apparently, nothing to see here. Unless you're a state Capitol cop, that is.
As the Cap Times story suggests, state troopers apparently have now taken to dragging protesters from the Capitol to a non-descript state administrative building a mile away, a building that sounds a bit like a de facto ministry of state security. [State police officials wouldn't comment to the Cap Times.]
Who over the past four years has run the Wisconsin State Patrol, the state's police agency? Well, he is a Walker appointee who also happens to be the father of two recently powerful Republican state legislators.
Under State Patrol chief Stephen Fitzgerald, a former sheriff, state troopers in 2011 were sent out to find the Democratic state lawmakers who, as it turned out, had crossed the border into the safe haven of Illinois, for weeks denying Republicans a quorum on Walker's first anti-union bill.
That was around the same time that a very Nixonian-sounding Walker suggested he was ready to call in the National Guard in the event of protester violence (he re-upped that warning recently in expectation of protests over the right-to-work law). In a private, recorded phone call with a comedian pretending to be one of the notorious Koch brothers, Walker revealed back in 2011 that his team had considered sending in agents provocateur to cause trouble. In the end, he decided against it, he said. One supposes that a President Walker wouldn't be sending undercover commando squads to dress up like ISIS troops, either.
[It's noteworthy, by the way, that Walker often speaks of himself in the majestic plural, as in, "We have been considering... ." He seems to most often shift from "I" to "we" when he wants to add gravitas to his pronouncements and perhaps spread around future blame. This, for aggrieved Wisconsin voters, could become the basis of a drinking game.]
Walker has engaged in all sorts of heavy-duty messing around to deal politically with massive, yet almost entirely peaceful protest demonstrations taking place in many Wisconsin cities. Typically these protests have included adults, students, the elderly, children, family pets, musicians and pizza delivery. Despite all the scheming, however, Walker didn't actually quell any protests, as he intimates. People at some point simply had to get back to their lives, which too often were made more difficult because of Walker's policies.
So, observers should not mistake the strategic retreat of protesters for acquiescence in the face of Walker's suggestion that he faced them down. Indeed, while scheming without much impact to disrupt the protests and keep opponents out of public hearings, Walker and other Republicans nevertheless seemed intimidated by all the activity, entering and leaving the Capitol with police escorts via secret passages, while complaining bitterly about how the protesters were contrarily disrupting their working lives. And the GOP complaining resumed when the protests started back up last week.
Meanwhile, Walker both in his political biography "Unintimidated" and before conservative audiences in Iowa has emphasized threats against himself and his family. He moved lugubriously from vivid descriptions of these threats (descriptions that security agencies typically recommend against sharing) to describing the scope of the protests.
These ideas paired represent a non sequitur, but told in tandem they might lead listeners to infer that an unusually high number of threats against Walker somehow came en masse along with all those hundreds of thousands of people who protested in person and/or signed petitions recalling him from public office. In fact, Walker dramatically described in gruesome detail how an one threatening person proposed to harm his wife.
But his comments in this regard seem entirely out of proportion. The Wisconsin State Journal reported in 2011, at the height of the protests, that police had investigated and closed 78 cases of threats made in connection with the statewide uproar. Of those, 15 threats were made against Walker, but there were twice as many made against Democratic lawmakers. Another 12 threats were made against other Republican lawmakers and 21 miscellaneous threats were made against protesters, police officers, Madison’s mayor, and others.
Investigators deemed the majority of the threats to have come from “hapless drunks.” Only one was deemed a truly significant threat, and that one was made against numerous politicians. More threats have been recorded since then, against any number of politicians across the nation's political spectrum, especially Barack Obama, along with threats against non-politicians. Walker persists in creating the illusion that he has suffered more than most, and that there's some kind of correlation between those threats and protests against his policies.
It is telling that, among all those politicians and the others who received threats, only Walker has used them front and center in his book and the current presidential primary cycle, portraying himself as a brave, unintimidated, triumphant, yet sorely aggrieved victim.
The giant Wisconsin protests four years ago were described by Walker's own spokesman at the time as peaceful. The recent protests seem equally benign. And yet, Walker now says his approach to those protests informs the way he would deal with a militaristic, terrorist operation half a world away. How? Talk tough while imagining you're Rambo? Busting little old lady terrorists for jumping the line to the toilets?
In the case of threats from ISIS, at least, a President Walker would likely have something real to push against, instead of tilting at windmills as he has so far in order to score cheap points.
Walker arguably has woven his own tapestry out of the traditional Republican yarn of victimhood. But on close inspection that tapestry is frayed and threadbare. Added up, Walker's moves to quell legitimate public protest haven't been so much due to an abundance of caution as they represent the man's soft-pedaled abundance of caustic.