Empower Wisconsin | Dec. 3, 2019
By M.D. Kittle
MADISON — From the day Scott Walker was first elected Wisconsin governor, liberals were calling for the Republican’s political head.
Sound familiar?
Walker, who was the only governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election, says it’s all just history repeating itself in the left’s quest to impeach President Donald Trump.
“The bottom line is, this is very much like what we saw here years ago with the recall election,” Walker said on Capital City Sunday.
Walker noted the many congressional Democrats talking about impeaching the president since shortly after he was elected — and long before the latest impeachment push over Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Walker said House Democrats don’t really care what they find, as long as it leads to the removal of their Public Enemy No. 1.
“They are just looking for some excuse to try to impeach the president because they don’t like the outcome of the election,” the former governor said.
Walker knows the feeling. He was ultimately targeted by labor unions who despised Act 10, Walker’s signature reforms to Wisconsin’s public sector collective-bargaining laws. The fiscal and social conservative was a lightning rod for liberals — both in the Badger State and nationally.
The Associated Press’ Scott Bauer had it half right when he recently wrote:
A divisive leader drove the opposition to extreme measures. The political climate was toxic — with little civil debate or middle ground. The clash ended in a high-risk political showdown that captured the nation’s attention and shaped the next election.
It wasn’t the “divisive” leader who drove Democrats to “extreme measures.” They drove themselves to distraction, or as some aptly put it, Walker Derangement Syndrome. They hated the man and his policies so much that they would stop at nothing to turn him out, including begging their speech cop and prosecutor allies to launch an unconstitutional secret investigation into Walker and Wisconsin’s conservative movement.
Just like in the Dems’ lust for impeachment, Wisconsin liberals’ in 2012 pushed their recall campaign at their own peril.
Wisconsin voters, particularly independent voters, grew weary of the long, politically driven recall campaign, and Walker beat back the effort at the polls.
Walker said the same is happening on the national front. He said people have had it.
“As it was with the protests and eventually the recall election in Wisconsin for me years ago, the left so overreacted that it actually turned off swing voters,” the former governor told WKOW News. “It got to the point where people said, ‘Is this all they care about?’ I think you’re starting to see the same thing when it comes to impeachment.”
Indeed.
The latest Quinnipiac University poll finds 48 percent of voters now say the president should not be impeached and removed from office, while 45 percent say Trump should be driven out.
In Wisconsin, a battleground state in next year’s presidential election, opposition to impeachment is growing. Last month’s Marquette Law School Poll found 53 percent of registered voters do not believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office, with 40 percent of respondents supporting impeachment and removal. That’s a 4 percentage point drop from the previous month, when 44 percent of respondents favored Trump’s ouster.
“Most voters, particularly undecided, independent voters, want people in Washington to get things done,” Walker said during his appearance on Capital City Sunday.
