John Celock

john.celock@huffingtonpost.com

Senator Pam Galloway Resigns Seat On Wisconsin Legislature, GOP Loses Senate Control

Posted: 03/16/2012 4:00 pm Updated: 03/16/2012 5:48 pm

A Wisconsin state senator facing a June primary election abruptly resigned Friday, plunging the Senate into a tie and shaking up the state's political landscape.

Sen. Pam Galloway (R-Wausau) announced she would be resigning effective Saturday from the seat she has held since her November 2010 election. In a statement on her website and Facebook page, Galloway said that she was resigning in order to deal with family issues.

"Today I am announcing my retirement from the Wisconsin State Senate. After a great deal of thought and consideration, I've decided to put the needs of my family first," Galloway said. "My family has experienced multiple, sudden and serious health issues, which require my full attention. Unfortunately, this situation is not compatible with fulfilling my obligations as state senator or running for re-election at this time."

Galloway, the chairwoman of the Senate Public Health, Human Services and Revenue Committee, was facing a competitive recall election vs. Rep. Donna Seidel (D). When Seidel's candidacy was announced last month, Democrats were quick to trumpet her candidacy, noting that her district gave her a boost in the Senate race.

Galloway gave no hint of a potential resignation in a statement she posted on her website March 2, where she questioned the validity of the recall signatures and said there were "questionable signatures." In the statement she said that many of the signatures were gathered by out-of-state residents who were paid to force a recall against her.

The recall election will remain in place, but as a special election to fill Galloway's term, according to Reid Magney, spokesman for the state Government Accountability Board. Magney said that since the board determined that the recall committee had met the signature requirement to force an election against Galloway, the race will proceed with a May 8 primary and June 5 election. Candidates would need to file petition signatures to enter the Republican race. A primary will not be held in the event one candidate enters from a party, Magney said in an interview Friday afternoon.

"Essentially the recall committee filed its signatures and the board found there to be sufficient signatures," Magney told HuffPost.

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In the event that Galloway had resigned without the recall threat, Gov. Scott Walker (R) would have been responsible for scheduling a special election for her seat.

Galloway's resignation also sets up a 16-16 tie in the Senate until the June 5 election. Following last summer's successful recalls of several Republican senators, Republicans controlled the Senate by a 17-16 majority. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Clyman) told the Wisconsin Radio Network that he and Minority Leader Mark Miller (D-Monona) will become co-Senate leaders. There is no precedent for breaking a tie in the Wisconsin Senate.

The Wisconsin tie comes as the Legislature ended its session earlier this week. Wisconsin will be the second state in the country with a tied Senate. In Virginia, while both parties hold an equal number of seats, with Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) casting the tie breaking vote. Tied legislative bodies have been common in other states, with Democrats and Republicans sharing control of the New Jersey Senate, including co-presidents, from 2002 to 2004.

According to Galloway's campaign website, the Senate seat was her first public office. A surgeon by profession, she ran on a primarily economic platform calling for job creation, tax control and spending reduction. Among the legislation she sponsored were bills to allow guns in public buildings, create a tax credit for private school tuition and the prohibition of receiving, transporting or selling fetal body parts.

In addition to the election to fill Galloway's seat, Wisconsin voters will have recall elections pending against Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (R) and three other state senators, including Fitzgerald.

Romney Won't Say Whether He Would Have Signed Lilly Ledbetter Act

The Huffington Post  |  By Sam Stein Posted: 04/16/2012 7:32 pm

When Mitt Romney's economic advisers were asked last week whether the former governor supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act, they took a few hours to produce an answer. Even then, the aides left some questions unanswered.

Romney, aides said, supports the concept of equal pay for equal work and has no interest in repealing existing legislation. Whether Romney would have actually signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act into law in early 2009 was left less clear. During an interview with the likely GOP presidential nominee on Monday, ABC's Diane Sawyer tried to nail down a more definitive answer. And, once more, Romney punted.

DIANE SAWYER: I want to talk about a couple of issues relating to women. This 19-point difference between you and the president on women. Here are some specific questions. If you were president -- you had been president -- would you have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Law?

MITT ROMNEY: It's certainly a piece of legislation I have no intend -- intention of changing. I wasn't there three years ago ...

DIANE SAWYER: But would you have signed it?

MITT ROMNEY: I'm not going to go back and look at all the prior laws and say had I been there which ones would I have supported and signed, but I certainly support equal pay for women and -- and have no intention of changing that law, don't think there's a reason to.

It's worth noting that Romney's vague answer supporting "equal pay for women" is not necessarily the same as support for the act itself. The law allows for lengthier legal channels for women to sue employers for wage discrimination. 

Republican Women in Denial

Ben Adler on April 11, 2012 - 1:21 PM ET

Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich listens at left, as his wife Callista introduces him during a campaign stop at Hood College in Frederick, Md., Monday, April 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Ann Heisenfelt)

You have to feel just a little sad for Callista Gingrich. When she began having an affair with Newt Gingrich, he was House minority leader and on his way to becoming Speaker. He later told his soon-to-be-ex-wife Marianne that Callista would “help me become president.” And, remarkably enough, there was a moment or two in recent months where that seemed possible. Gingrich surged to the top of the national polls in early December, and he won a dramatic victory in the South Carolina primary. Callista, a former Congressional staffer, has surely entertained a few daydreams of being first lady.

Not anymore. On Tuesday afternoon Callista Gingrich appeared at the Republican Women’s Club in New York, an imposing gray, seven-story townhouse across the street from Rockefeller Center. The venue was impressive, but the event was not. The entire press delegation consisted of a producer from ABC News and a two-person team from a Chinese television station. The club apparently struggled to pull together its attendance of roughly sixty people. (One attendee told me she was called by the club and asked to come.)

The demographics didn’t augur well for the future of the GOP. The average age at the luncheon tables appeared to be around 75. I counted more women in pearl necklaces, more women in purple suits and more women with platinum blonde dyed hair (including Gingrich on all counts), than women who aren’t white.

Not a single woman I interviewed—of those who would let me, they were surprisingly hostile and generally unwilling to divulge basic information, such as their names—intends to vote for Newt Gingrich in New York’s upcoming primary.

You might expect this to be a depressing event for Gingrich for other reasons as well. The Republican war on women has severely damaged the GOP’s brand among women. Consequently, were the election held today women voters would provide Obama with his margin of victory, and a healthy one at that.

So you would expect the Republican Women’s Club to be a pretty demoralized crowd, right? Wrong. The table closest to me boisterously toasted the GOP and joked that President Obama had better start working on his presidential library.

When I asked about their party’s unpopularity among women and the reasons for it, I was met with nothing more than blinkered partisan denial. Some people simply denied the math of recent polls showing that Romney’s advantage among men is outweighed by Obama’s far greater advantage among women. For example, a lawyer told me she isn’t worried about Republicans doing poorly among women because “historically, for whatever reasons, Republicans have appealed to men more and Democrats to women.” Others simply denied the numbers, saying it all depends on which polls you look at.

These are irrelevant truths. Obama’s margin varies from poll to poll, but he consistently leads in all of them. And while women have always leaned more Democratic than men, they are currently leaning much more Democratic than men are leaning Republican.

On the substance of the issues that have made the Republicans look so retrograde to so many women, the majority in attendance simply spouted GOP talking points. “The press is making such a big deal out of birth control, which [banning] isn’t Romney’s platform,” said a woman who gave her name only as Delores. “[Insurance coverage] has nothing to do with birth control,” said another. “I’d like to have my eyeglasses covered.”

Even the predicament of a rape victim brought to the nearest hospital, which may happen to be a Catholic institution, generated no sympathy or compromise. According to Romney, Gingrich et al., a woman in such a circumstance should be denied emergency contraception (also known as “the morning-after pill”) and forced to carry her rapist’s fetus. “After you’ve been raped it’s too late for contraception,” Delores offered.

Ironically, the attendee who appeared to be most in touch with political reality, and the most reasonable on the substance of reproductive freedom, was Marilyn Reagan, a distant cousin of former President Reagan. “If you’re going to frown on abortion you need to provide contraception,” she said. “It’s the [Republican] men I’m worried about. They want to preach. Some of it seems religiously motivated.”

When I accosted Gingrich on her way in and asked what she’d be speaking about she said, “American exceptionalism.” I asked whether she would address the Republican war on women. “No,” she said, with a laugh. “Why not?” I asked. “Because I’m here to talk about American exceptionalism,” she said.

Her speech didn’t give anyone a specific reason to vote Republican, much less for her husband. It was a paean to America’s fantastic history. The only nominal connection to contemporary politics was the false assertion she frequently repeated that liberals and “elites” think America to be undistinguished among the nations. (This is strange since she mentioned liberal heroes John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. as having “testified” to America’s greatness.) “Nothing pinpoints you as a conservative more than believing in American exceptionalism,” said Gingrich. Presumably that means she either thinks President Obama is a conservative, or she didn’t listen to either of his two speeches to Democratic National Conventions. (Delores explained that Obama abandoned his belief in American exceptionalism upon taking office, and that he has explicitly proclaimed upon America’s unexceptional nature from the Oval Office, although she couldn’t furnish any offhand examples.)

The Gingrich campaign is not the only one afraid of addressing women’s rights. On Wednesday morning Sam Stein of Huffington Post asked Mitt Romney’s campaign on a conference call with reporters whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The answer? Six seconds of silence followed by “We’ll get back to you.” Hours later the Romney campaign made a half-hearted attempt to fight back on the gender front by issuing a statement from Representative Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) saying Obama is to blame for the rate of unemployment among women. Of course, macroeconomic conditions are completely unrelated to the question of whether Romney, like Obama, supports full legal equality for women.

I asked Reagan whether she thought Republican men would wise up on the subject of women’s rights. “It will take a long time,” she said.