Free Republic

The Republican Party is willing to get people killed to immunize itself from the threat of democratic accountability. Whatever happens in Wisconsin’s primary and State Supreme Court elections Tuesday, that should be the headline. **SNIP** By Monday, it was clear that Wisconsin had no means of holding a free and fair election this week. A majority of the state’s poll workers had announced that they were not willing to jeopardize their lives by greeting continuous streams of voters for hours on end (in often tightly packed and poorly ventilated quarters). In Milwaukee, election officials revealed that they only had enough...

A top Republican House member on Wednesday proposed eliminating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, writing a bill that would freeze all hiring at the troubled agency and require the Justice Department to come up with a plan for transferring its duties to other agencies. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who wrote the bill, called it both a chance to streamline government and to clean up an agency that’s been criticized from the right and the left for botched gun-running operations.