Waiting for my South American colleagues before a meeting of the General Assembly of the International Cooperative Alliance in a resort lobby in Cancun on Tuesday morning, I opened my computer to catch a few minutes of the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules hearing on Wisconsin Eye. The hearing was called last week immediately after the Government Accountability Board (GAB) met to reconsider several opinions and decisions they had made at their September meeting.

These decisions concern allowing technical college student IDs to count as valid voter IDs at the polls, allowing the use of stickers on student IDs to augment the information already on them to come into compliance with the voter ID law, and not allowing the pre-population of voter specific data on downloadable recall petition forms.

I wrote about the GAB’s meeting in an article last week and described the byzantine rule-making process state administrative agencies have to negotiate in order to administer and enforce the law. The Republican leadership of the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules called the hearing in order to determine whether these three decisions rose to the level of administrative rules.

A determination of “rule” would force the decisions into the rule making process, effectively voiding them until the governor decides to act. While the rules sit in limbo, no new administrative rule, opinion or decision can be made that is substantially similar to the ones already in process.

My consciousness was completely divided as I anticipated the arrival of my new worker cooperative colleagues while tuning into the hearing online. Although the outcome was obviously predetermined, I found myself riveted to the gruesome details of the authoritarian political maneuvering of these rightwing legislators. I don’t want to be the person sewing the Fitzwalkerstan equivalent of the Star of David on my coat asking, “How did this happen?”

I would rather have been writing about what worker cooperative federations from across the world are doing this week at the General Assembly of the International Cooperative Alliance to build regional and international economic networks driven by the needs and the will of workers. I could have been working out my thoughts about the complexity of being a representative from a country with the most economically and violently exploitative government on the planet among representatives from countries like Colombia and Mexico, which have borne the brunt of U.S. imperial power through free trade agreements and the war on drugs.

I could have been writing about the paradoxical situation of the worker cooperative movement in the Americas whereby Argentina and Brazil--economic “basket cases” a decade ago due to the effects of neo-liberal economic policy directed by the U.S.--are now the powerhouses of worker coop development while the movement in the U.S. is by far the least developed in the hemisphere.

Hell, I could have been taking a nap on the beach, but instead I was glued to the political theatre unfolding on the 4th floor of the Wisconsin State Capitol two thousand miles away.

Defending his office, GAB Director Kevin Kennedy described the GAB’s reasoning for its decisions and then told the committee, “It is both impractical and unwise to invoke the rulemaking process. It will hinder the state’s ability to ensure timely guidance to poll workers and uniform protection for elections.”

Committee co-chair Republican Senator Leah Vukmir admonished Kennedy, “We started with a trust-but-verify stance and now we have moved on to verify. I am troubled that you did not take our concerns into consideration.” Ever the master of projection, she wondered aloud if the six retired judges who comprise the GAB had caved into the political pressure of the forty or so people who gave input at the GAB meeting last week.

Democratic Senator Fred Risser, the longest serving member of the Wisconsin legislature who has held office since 1956, objected to the holding of the hearing saying, “We shouldn’t even be thinking about rules.” He further said, “The issue here is we’re setting precedent. We’re deciding the precedent as to whether our GAB is going to be an independent Board or whether it is going to be controlled by legislative or executive directives.”

Risser raised fundamental questions about checks and balances and the separation of powers. He asked, “Are we going to give the board the right to function independently of us, or are we going to tell them what to do and how to do it? If we don’t like what they’re doing, we pass a law to tell them to do it differently. We don’t damn the judge; we change the law. I don’t want GAB to be simply responsive to the majority party saying we don’t like what you’re doing.”

Following this theme, Senator Lena Taylor quipped, “It does matter whether we give the target of a recall election full authority about the rules of that very recall. As a lawyer, even on its face, the thought of impropriety is all over it.”

After several hours of Democrats peeling back the layers of ideological justifications put forth by Republicans on the committee to expose the raw motive of political discipline, the motions were finally made to direct the GAB to write rules on the three decisions for the approval of the governor. They all passed on a 6-4 party line vote.

The friends for whom I was waiting finally showed up just as the hearing was getting over. They asked me what I was doing and I explained that I was documenting the dismantling of democracy in my state as a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs on the path into the dark forest so we can find our way out again once conditions have improved. Being from Argentina and Uruguay, both countries with a history of extremely repressive and violent dictatorships, they understood exactly what I meant.

Rebecca Kemble is an Anthropologist who studied decolonization in Kenya. She serves on the Board of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and as the President of the Dane County TimeBank.