Fascism at Your Doorstep – Special Emergency Powers Legislation
Daily Journal (Opinion), Media, PoliticsFeb 25, 2011
The news from Wisconsin today is that Wisconsin State Troopers, under the direction of a political appointee of the Governor, are visiting the homes of legislators who are resisting the Governor’s deeply unpopular legislation. By what reckoning can an executive, using armed men in state uniforms, dictate a legislator’s prerogatives, or the prerogatives of a caucus of legislators? If you chose “brute force,” you answered correctly.
The extremely dubious provocation of sending State Troopers to legislators’ homes gives the impression that what the legislators are doing is illegal. It’s not. And by attempting to refocus the media on where the legislators live with their families and children, instead of the huge mass demonstrations at the capitol, it seeks to exert not only official, state-sanctioned physical intimidation of those legislators in the places where their spouses and children live. By bringing the legislators’ homes into the discussion it invites unofficial state-sanctioned violence in the form of people like Jared Lee Loughner, the man who brought a gun to a political event and injured