Note on Transcripts

As an editorial comment, I'd like to call attention to the start of some remarks of Senator Taylor's:

Mr. President and members, you know one of the things that I will say is that the GOP is good at messaging.  "Voter ID," of course!  On its face people say "well, Voter ID?"  But this bill is so much more than just require an ID.  This bill disenfrachises people.  This bill really is voter suppression.

Going back before even this legislative session, the key GOP political manoeuvre has been labelling voter ID and Assembly Bill 7 as a common-sense security measure.  It is hugely important that we fight this, even as we watch the bill sail through the legislature on straight party-line votes.  Even beyond the direct effects of this bill, Wisconsin Republicans stand to gain when the public sees this bill as reasonable.  We have to educate the voter who thinks the Republicans have backed off from extreme legislation after the collective bargaining fight, and have taken up more palatable bills.  The only good that can come from AB7 is if every tabled amendment and every floor vote costs the Republicans politically.  Wisconsin needs to know that the majority in the legislature hasn't slowed down in the slightest in pursuing the exact same goals they had in mind on February 11th, and that AB7 is a part of that.

This bill is slated to almost certainly pass the legislature first thing tomorrow morning.  From there, we'll see a short speech by Governor Walker upon signing, expounding the same GOP message that has driven this bill for the past decade.   AB7 will become law. Then, and only then, will the real debate start.  There will be court challenges.  There will be concrete instances of disenfranchisement in future elections.  There will be costs and long DMV lines and people struggling to leap these new hurdles.

During all of this we will be pointing to what our Democratic legislators have been doing this past week.  We'll point to amendments, remarks, and speeches which have all been ignored and tabled by the an unthinking majority.  The debate over the voter ID bill was always fated to end with the bill passing on party lines.  It's the debate over the voter ID law that we'll win.

I originally took the step of excerpting and transcribing the JFC remarks by Senator Jauch as a favor to a few people on twitter (and to fight insomnia). There is a weird band of us who will watch Wisconsin Eye during our lunch break, or sit in the gallery until the wee hours of the morning.  We've seen some inspiring things done and said by Wisconsin Democrats, and we've all informally tried to share these with the wider world.  Not everyone will skip to a specific timepoint in a six-hour committee hearing or trek to the capitol to watch a bill be debated.  The message that legislators are giving on the floors of the senate and the assembly will only count if we remix, excerpt, and archive these comments and make them accessible to every voter we can convince.