The Garth Brooks song “The Storm” comes to mind tonight as news reports indicate that enough signatures have been gathered to make the fourth Republican state senator face the voters this summer in a recall election.
The door it slammed like thunder and the tears they fell like rain
And the warnings from her family whirl like a hurricane
She’s drowning in emotions and she cannot reach the shore
She’s alive but can she survive the storm
The voters will be heard!
West-central Wisconsin Democrats say they have succeeded in gathering more than enough signatures to force a recall election of state Sen. Sheila Harsdorf this summer.
Harsdorf, R-River Falls, is one of eight Republican state senators targeted for their support of what Democrats call Gov. Scott Walker’s radical agenda, including his budget repair bill that curtails collective bargaining rights for most of the state’s roughly 300,000 public workers.
After holding celebrations across the district Monday evening, recall organizers plan to have a vehicle caravan drive to Madison Tuesday to file the signatures with the state Government Accountability Board, said Bob Salt, chairman of the Dunn County Democratic Party.
The Government Accountability Board has indicated 15,744 signatures – a quarter of the votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election – are required to trigger a recall election in Harsdorf’s 10th Senate District, but Salt said organizers collected about 20,000 since March 2 just to be safe.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 
Sounds like sour grapes. You don’t like the results of the people’s choice, recall. Hmm…may be that’s what we’ll have to do every time someone gets elected we didn’t vote for…Obama, Kind, etc.
Berta,
Let me respond to your comment with a hopefully not too long one of my own. At the end of this I hope you will understand why the recalls matter….it is about the process of government that the state Republicans have undermined.
This was first posted on my blog on May 5th so some of the thoughts may be dated, but you wull get the theme all the same.
When I was a kid in school I vividly recall my history teachers telling me that Wisconsin was special because we had such a clean government. Our way of conducting politics was so much different from Illinois. That was always the example that was provided to show the clear line between the way things should be done, and how others did them.
I thought about the teachers who uttered those words and wondered what they might say in light of the news Thursday about how signatures were gathered for recall petitions of state senators in the Badger State.
While there has been a robust and heated dialogue for several months over the contentious issue of collective bargaining, I really thought we might have learned one thing regardless of the position we each held on the matter. After the number of editorials and letters to the editor, and chats with our neighbors and colleagues I was sure we all came to the same conclusion on one matter.
What I was sure we agreed on was the importance that needs to be placed on the process of how we conduct politics. At the end of the day, if we use the time-honored political procedures in an honest, and up-front way everyone can say the game was played fairly. Win or lose, no one can say the deck was stacked unfairly against them.
After all, it is that lack of following a prescribed way of running legislative business that has created the legal turmoil that is playing out all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. We can all have different views about if the ending of collective bargaining is a wise and proper policy choice, or a wrong-headed and political one. But at the end of the controversy we should all recognize the need to play by one set of rules.
This all leads me to the news that perhaps many signatures were obtained in a dishonorable way when trying to find the required number to force recall elections of state senators.
It seems to me we are at a crossroads in Wisconsin, and I hope we have not crossed it, in how we conduct politics. While I am as partisan and convinced of my point of view as anyone, I am also well aware that the underpinnings which allow for this whole wonderful process to operate fairly for all must be honored.
This is time to take stock in what we want Wisconsin to be. Should it more resemble the one my teachers made every effort to inform me about, or should it be the one that was used as the example of what we should not become?