Did you take a look at Thom Hartmann’s newsletter on Wednesday, It's Time to Enforce the Constitution & Ban Seditious Republicans from Congress? It’s a good one. He went over the 14th Amendment argument and congratulated the judge in New Mexico who kicked fascist and insurrectionist Couy Griffin out of office and bared him from running for anything again— ever. And he noted that “Multiple Senators and House members were texting and carrying on phone calls with Trump and Giuliani on and immediately before the attack, as the January 6th Select Committee has found. Some were even talking with Trump or his people during the peak of the January 6th attack. Others, like Lauren Bobert, stand accused of tweeting the location (or absence thereof) of Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress as the Republican mob attacked with the clear intent to kill Pelosi and Pence.”
One senator who participated in the attempted coup was Wisconsin extremist Ron Johnson, who was integral in the failed fake electors plot. On Tuesday, writing for Milwaukee’s weekly, Shepherd Express, Joel McNally reported that “In many states, respectable Republicans would rather not be associated with the embarrassing MAGA extremists Trump personally recruited or endorsed in their states. Republican nominees for governor in the closely divided swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona are full-fledged election deniers eager to award those states’ electoral votes to Trump in 2024 regardless of the election results. Wisconsin Republican nominee Tim Michels has engaged in a lot of double talk over whether he's ready to accept election results. That makes him a threat to democracy.”
Republican leaders in the House and Senate missed their chance to distance their party from Trump after the one-term loser was defeated by seven million votes. The perfect time to do that would have been on January 6, 2021, after Americans watched in horror as Trump’s violent supporters bludgeoned their way with flagpoles through more than 140 Capitol Police officers in hopes of hanging Vice President Mike Pence and bagging a few Senators and House members.
But Republicans were afraid of losing the support of Trump’s vicious supporters in the midterms. And honestly, many also were afraid for their own safety and that of their families. Trump’s mob really was ready to murder Pence for refusing to pretend fake Trump electoral votes submitted in states Biden won including Wisconsin were legitimate.
Republicans were once smugly confident of returning to power in the midterms in the House and possibly the Senate as well. Historically, the party losing the presidency almost always gains back seats in the House and Senate in the first midterms. But Republicans suddenly find themselves in a wildly unprecedented political environment.
Far too many Republicans believe Trump’s absurd lies Biden stole the election in a conspiracy between Republican and Democratic election officials to count millions of fraudulent Democratic votes. It’s saddled the party with terrible midterm candidates babbling Trump’s nonsense.
Polls show the threat to democracy is rising as a top issue in the midterms. So is the destruction of the Constitutional right to abortion protected for a half century by the Supreme Court until Trump’s radical new justices abruptly abolished it ending women’s freedom to decide for themselves whether to give birth everytime they become pregnant.
Worst of all for Republicans, Trump has put himself on the midterm ballot simultaneously campaigning for the appalling candidates he’s endorsed while running for president again in 2024 promising “full pardons with an apology” for the violent insurrectionists being prosecuted for attacking the federal government on January 6.
We haven’t even mentioned yet Trump is in the news every day for taking hundreds of secret government documents home with him when he left the presidency and refusing to give them back. After Trump’s lawyers falsely claimed he’d returned all government documents, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and recovered hundreds of classified documents illegally in possession of a private citizen under the Espionage Act.
And later this month, the bipartisan House January 6 Committee is expected to resume their dramatic public hearings on all the possible crimes committed by Trump and his inner circle. That just might possibly have some effect on voting in the midterms.
On the Hugh Hewitt radio show today, Johnson said “If you love this nation and are concerned about its future, join us. Join us in unifying and healing and saving this nation. That’s what we need to do.” He was a coup plotter who should be in prison, not the Senate. He still has one of the fake electors, Pam Travis, working for him. After saying a couple of months ago that he saw no reason to vote against the marriage equality bill, Senator Unify the Country has now announced he’s voting against it. Last night Amy Wang and Marianna Sotomayor reported that “Speaking last week to a group of conservative voters in Wisconsin, Johnson told an audience member that he issued his July statement only ‘to get [the media] off my back’ about the issue… ‘You have to understand the process here. You’re walking down the subway in the Capitol and all of a sudden you get descended [upon] by national press,’ Johnson told an audience member at the Sept. 1 meeting. ‘…You just get hounded on this crap, right? So, just to get ’em off my backs, I wrote a press release. And I said I always supported civil unions, never felt that we needed to do anything other than that, but then the Supreme Court ruled [on abortion], and I just considered the matter settled.’… Johnson then said he actually would not support the Respect for Marriage Act ‘in its current state’ because of concerns over religious liberties, but said he and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) were working together on ‘just a smokin’ amendment’ that would protect those liberties.”
Yesterday, Bulwark writer Bill Lueders noted that Johnson’s latest shtik is pretending to be a man of the people. He votes against anything and everything that could remotely helping working class and middle class people, claiming that Democrats push programs like these in order to “make more Americans dependent on government.”
Curiously, as Erik Gunn of the Wisconsin Examiner reported last week, Johnson’s own businesses have received considerable government assistance over the years. This includes industrial revenue bonds that saved “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in interest, a federal grant for a new rail spur to a new company factory, and even a Wisconsin Department of Corrections program that let Johnson’s companies use prison laborers, their health care costs paid by the state.
The difference is that, when Johnson benefits from government spending, it’s a wise use of public funds. When other people benefit, it’s wasteful and wrong.
That’s why, in May, Johnson was among a small group of senators who blocked legislation to help restaurants facing permanent closure due to the pandemic. This was shortly after he revealed, in another interview, that he’s “not that fond of restaurants.” They’re not fond of him. When a group of small-business advocates known as the Main Street Alliance went to Johnson’s office in Washington, D.C., to lobby him on this restaurant package, he did not meet with them.
To further shore up his man-of-the-people bona fides, Johnson in August helped narrowly defeat an amendment that would have capped the cost of insulin at $35 per month. What do the 50 Democrats and seven Republican senators who voted in favor think this is, Denmark?
Johnson also voted against a gun safety bill that was passed with bipartisan support in response to recent mass shootings, calling it “a classic example of Washington dysfunction.” The moderate Wisconsin State Journal drew national notice with its editorial in response, saying Johnson “seems to think his only shot at winning reelection this fall— having broken his promise not to run again— is to fire up the thinning Trump base by opposing just about everything.”
…Johnson has said the January 6th Capitol riot “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” While the non-rioting non-insurrectionists were pummeling police, Johnson tried to deliver fake documents naming Trump the winner of Wisconsin’s vote into the hands of Vice President Mike Pence, whose office refused them.
In March, Johnson hired Pam Travis, one of the ten Wisconsin Republicans who took part in this scheme to steal the election by committing fraud, as a full-time member of his campaign staff. Asked about the hire, Johnson campaign spokesperson Ben Voelkel said: “It is really sad that Mandela Barnes supporters are going as low as to levy a baseless attack against a private citizen.”
In purported contrast to such “baseless” attacks, Johnson and his supporters are portraying Barnes as a tax cheat. That’s because, in 2018, Barnes paid no income taxes—because he didn’t earn enough money to owe any—and was five months late in paying property taxes on a condo he owned, which he did with interest. No laws were bent or broken.
Meanwhile, Johnson has used loopholes to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes. In 2017, when his net worth was estimated at $27 million, Johnson paid just $2,105 in state income tax, about the same as a married couple filing jointly with a taxable income of $40,000.
In fact, Johnson refused to back Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act until it added a tax break from which he profited personally. “Now, did my business benefit? Sure. Did some of my donor businesses? Sure,” Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “When you give tax relief to everybody, everybody benefits.”
But an investigation by ProPublica found that “Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country.” The two families are Dick and Liz Uihlein of shipping supplier Uline, and Diane Hendricks, a major roofing wholesale distributor. “The expanded tax break Johnson muscled through netted them $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone, drastically reducing the income they owed taxes on. At that rate, the cut could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.”
Together, the Uihleins and Hendricks gave about $20 million to groups backing Johnson in his 2016 re-election campaign. They are now major funders of Wisconsin Truth, a super PAC working to help re-elect Johnson: Elizabeth Uihlein and Diane Hendricks “have bankrolled more than 90 percent of the $10.3 million raised for Johnson by the PAC so far this year.”
The race between Johnson and Barnes is a toss-up, with some polls giving Barnes a slight edge.
Since Johnson took office in 2011, his personal wealth has more than doubled, to an estimated $48 million. He has expressed his disappointment that it was not more.
“My wealth doubled because I sold my business that went from book value to market value,” Johnson recently told a conservative radio host. “I should have quadrupled my wealth, like most people in their 401(k)’s did because that’s what the stock market did while I’ve been a U.S. senator.”
For Johnson, being a man of the people is not an easy thing.
In recent months, Johnson has been advocating that Social Security and Medicare be discretionary programs, rather than mandatory ones. That means Congress would have to fund them on a year-to-year basis, subject to the whims of whoever happens to be in power.
And in case this forces some seniors into poverty, Johnson has a solution for that, too: urge them to work past retirement age by offering the inducement of not charging them payroll taxes. “We’d get more seniors off of the sidelines, those that are capable of working,” he told a talk-show host in July.
With Ron Johnson on their side, Wisconsin residents can look forward to working for others practically until their dying day.
Nov. 8 will be a chance for them to show their appreciation.
