THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY IN WISCONSIN: State Republicans have set out to reverse the state's progressive legacy--by commandeering its mechanisms of governance.

• Author: Poland, Douglas M.
• Position: On Wisonsin

Over the past decade, the Republican leadership of Wisconsin's legislature has engaged in an all-out assault on democracy. The ferocity of this assault, the scope of the damage inflicted, and the sheer number of fronts on which the legislature is attacking make the struggle in Wisconsin a formidable and vital one.

As attorneys who have played a role in a number of lawsuits concerning how democracy works in Wisconsin, we have had a front-row seat to this struggle, which gains heightened importance given the states possibly pivotal role in the November 3 presidential election. With Milwaukee preparing to host the Democratic National Convention from August 17 to 20, we write to take stock of the damage, and of efforts to restore the states democratic process.

Misgovernance in Wisconsin over the past decade, and nationally during the Trump Administration, has raised a whole new set of issues, challenging basic precepts of democracy that had been cherished by both major parties. These new challenges do not revolve around the major themes that have long dominated American politics, but instead attack the soft connective tissue of democracy.

Wisconsin has been, unfortunately, ahead of the curve in this respect. We have already spent nearly a decade learning what happens when the levers of government are operated by people with open contempt for the fundamental principles of how our democracy should work. The issues at stake are those which--with the exception of the Civil War years--all sides have agreed upon for nearly 250 years.

Wisconsin has long been home to divergent political opinions, from the formation of the Republican Party in the 1850s to the "sewer socialists" who led Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century, and from "Fighting Bob" La Follette's Progressive Party to Joseph McCarthys abusive Red Scare. But in recent years in Wisconsin, the idea that people should govern and their preferences should be heard has been undermined.

Wisconsin stands as an example and a warning: If we continue to abandon our longstanding norms, the American experiment will look much different from what our forebears ever imagined.

We, along with a number of state groups and many Wisconsin residents, are trying to prevent that. Doug was one of the lead trial attorneys in Whitford v. Gill, which convinced a panel of federal judges that the state Republican Party's partisan gerrymandering was so extreme that it violated the Constitution. That case ultimately ended when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Constitution provides no remedy for partisan gerrymandering.

Jeff represented a coalition of plaintiffs who challenged the Wisconsin legislature's 2018 lame-duck power grab to strip authority from the Democrats who were elected as governor and attorney general even before they could take office.

We each separately represent voting-rights advocates in the Zignego v. Wisconsin Elections Commission lawsuit that has (at least thus far) fought off an effort to purge nearly a quarter-million voters from Wisconsin's rolls. And we each separately represented groups favoring public health in...