Republicans must pay for their failures at the polls on Nov. 3

In a few days, you will go to the polls. You should ignore all those political ads and instead evaluate the past 16 years of the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature. 

Ask yourself what those Republicans have done to improve our healthcare system, fund our public schools and provide property tax relief for you? How many tax cuts and tax loopholes have they provided for billionaires in Wisconsin while you struggle to make ends meet?  

Wisconsin’s own billionaires and out-of-state billionaires have taken full advantage of the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates for political ads and millions in campaign donations. All the money they’ve poured into Republican causes have paid off handsomely for them. 

One Republican who has been right in the middle of all that over the past 16 years is the current candidate for Governor, Tom Tiffany. Even though he wants people to think of him as an “aw-shucks” kind of guy, he has been a reliable vote for both the Walker and Trump agendas. 

Tiffany has been trying to run away from his record but we should have no doubts how he will govern after learning the divide-and-conquer strategy from Walker and Trump. And let’s not forget he was one of the key players in Wisconsin attempting to overturn the 2020 election for Trump. 

But it wasn’t just Tiffany. The entire Republican Party is responsible for our failed and broken healthcare system and for the inadequate funding of our public schools – and so much more – since they took over in 2011.

Let’s just run down the list of some of the ways Republicans have mishandled pressing matters in the state.

• ACT10, which destroyed public employees’ unions, resulting in ongoing and severe teacher shortages.   
• The FOXCONN debacle: In 2017, the promise of 13,000 new high paying jobs fell apart within months of the signing of the deal. Walker, Tiffany and many Republicans were warned over and over again that FOXCONN leadership seldom kept their promises. Over 10 years, barely 1,000 jobs were created while economic development consultants and attorneys walked away with millions of our taxpayer dollars.
• Inadequate public school and special education funding as the Legislature shifted tens of millions of dollars to unaccountable private voucher schools. 
• The Walker Administration’s failure to create the 250,000 private sector jobs he promised through methods that have ended up hurting the state: budget cuts, huge tax cuts for the wealthy, Right to Work laws and less environmental regulation.
• Cuts in funding for the world-renowned University of Wisconsin system, which included the flagship UW Madison campus, the 13 four-year campuses strategically located throughout Wisconsin and the two-year campuses in rural and urban settings. Most two-year campuses have closed because of funding cuts.
• The broken healthcare system:  Hospitals and clinics are closing in rural and urban areas while the Republican legislature has failed to adequately fund health care in the state. That failure includes the refusal to expand BadgerCare (the state’s Medicaid system) and the loss of billions in federal tax dollars.
• Failure to adequately fund urban, suburban and rural public transportation systems: Walker refused hundreds of millions in federal dollars to expand rail services in southeast Wisconsin. That impacts employment, health care, the environment and education.
• The underfunding of the Department of Natural Resource services and the firing of hundreds of DNR employees that monitor drinking water, ground water and air pollution.
• Voter suppression and voting barriers: The result of Republican-authored Constitutional amendments, which have made the state’s voter ID requirements some of the most stringent in the entire U.S, and which voting advocacy groups say have disenfranchised voters in urban and rural communities.

There’s so much more, from cuts to funding for state parks, failure to upgrade unemployment compensation systems, failure to deal with the childcare crisis, and failure to maintain our roads. Again, all of this while continuing to provide tax cuts to the billionaire class as most Wisconsin residents struggle to pay grocery bills, housing costs and transportation to and from work. 

It is time to turn the page on the right-wing agenda that has hurt hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents. If you want to end 16 years of failed, iron-fisted rule by Republicans, vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.