One Wisconsin Now

After Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed his frivolous lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board (GAB), he claimed that his motives were not partisan. He went on to claim that his position as John McCain co-chair played no role in the suit even though the action could help McCain by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of legal voters in Wisconsin. After his repeated denials, the media began to learn of multiple contacts that high level Van Hollen aides had with high level Republican Party operatives about the suit. It was not long after these contacts that Van Hollen filed the lawsuit. As if we have not already seen enough evidence of Van Hollen’s judgment being clouded by rank partisanship, now we actually have audio evidence of partisan plotting at the Republican convention in St. Paul.

Wispolitics has obtained a recording of J.B. Van Hollen addressing Wisconsin delegates to the Republican National Convention. In his remarks he clearly gives the partisan bunch a small taste of what he has planned for Wisconsin voters:

“We are out there front and center everyday and you'll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don't have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal.”

Let’s see if I understand this correctly. Van Hollen addresses a partisan crowd, signaling that he was going to use his official office to take action surrounding the November election. After repeated denials of contact between Van Hollen’s office and the state Republican Party, we learned that there actually were high level communications between the two about this subject. After the GOP failed to convince the GAB to willingly disenfranchise voters in Wisconsin, J.B. Van Hollen files a lawsuit against them to take that very action. After the suit was filed, the Republican Party then officially joined the suit to disenfranchise voters. All of this and J.B. Van Hollen is a McCain co-chair to boot! Exactly what part of this entire chain of events is NOT partisan?

Not only is J.B. Van Hollen endangering our right to vote but he is also sullying the office that was entrusted to him. This situation has shown that he is perfectly willing to use his official office to carry out very partisan goals. Not only that, but he is apparently willing to tell the public one thing while knowing that the complete opposite is true. He said there were no discussions and now he himself has been caught on tape having those very discussions with other partisans in St. Paul. How can we ever trust his "official" actions again without wondering about his real motives?