Trumpians try to recall the conservative GOP leader of the Wisconsin Assembly.
By
The Editorial Board – WSJ
March 13, 2024 6:18 pm ET
Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly Robin Vos speaks during a press conference at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., on Feb. 15, 2023. PHOTO: SAMANTHA MADAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A feature of the Trump-era Republican Party has been its collapse into disarray in swing states like Michigan and Arizona. Next up may be Wisconsin, where a faction of Republicans is trying to purge Assembly leader Robin Vos.
On Monday the Trump wing of the GOP announced it had submitted enough signatures to force a recall vote of Mr. Vos, a fellow Republican and the longest serving speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly.
Mr. Vos’s alleged offense is that he didn’t fight hard enough to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election victory in the state. Mr. Trump’s supporters wanted the election decertified, and Mr. Vos had to explain to people unwilling to listen that this wasn’t legally possible. Lawmakers “don’t have the ability to unilaterally overturn the election,” the Speaker said.
Mr. Vos nonetheless appointed former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to investigate irregularities. That probe found no evidence of fraud that would have overturned the election, but Mr. Gableman continued to assert that the election was stolen. Mr. Vos eventually fired Mr. Gableman after 14 months amid charges that the former judge had violated the state’s open records law.
In 2022 former President Trump and Mr. Gableman endorsed Mr. Vos’s primary opponent, who came within 260 votes of beating him. Now the state’s Trumpians don’t want to wait for November and are eager to recall him in a special election. Mr. Vos’s detractors are also sore that he failed to impeach Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, who is known for liberal views on absentee ballot drop boxes. Mr. Vos has said he favors Ms. Wolfe’s removal but lacks the votes.
Such are the inconveniences of living in a constitutional democracy. But Mr. Trump’s supporters think the appropriate response is to wage political war against the politician most likely to help their party maintain its majority under political maps recently rewritten to favor Democrats.
The Trump Republicans sent 10,700 signatures to the Wisconsin Elections Commission to trigger the recall. Mr. Vos will review the signatures for validity, and the Elections Commission will determine whether the petition has met the threshold of 6,850 valid signatures required from Mr. Vos’s district. Initial reports are that the commission believes the valid signatures are too few, but expect lawsuits.
And for what? Mr. Biden won Wisconsin by some 21,000 votes. The reason is that more than 60,000 voters who supported down-ballot GOP Congressional candidates didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. This was the pattern in the suburban areas of several swing states. A study of the 2020 election results by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a highly credible conservative legal group, found “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines.
Speaker Vos’s antagonists are allying themselves with the state’s progressives at a moment of GOP vulnerability. Mr. Vos and other legislators must run this year in new districts ordered by state Supreme Court that are far better for Democrats.
The urge to purge the GOP of dissenters is one reason the party has lost so many recent elections. Democrats in the Badger State couldn’t be happier at the spectacle.
Wow, lots of spin from the Wall Street smearnal.