Wineke: Robin Vos owns the Gableman fiasco

My guess is that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos experienced swells of acid indigestion Thursday when he read news accounts of Michael Gableman being cheered at a Donald Trump election conspiracy party.

Gableman is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice. Vos hired him last year to conduct an investigation of how the state’s presidential election was handled in 2020. Taxpayers are going to end up paying $1 million or more for that investigation.

I can only think that when he hired Gableman Vos thought he was diverting a bullet.

Former President Trump has been on his tail, carping that the election in Wisconsin was rigged and should be overturned.

Vos is not an idiot. He knows full well the election wasn’t rigged. It has been counted and recounted. President Biden won by about 20,000 votes. The election has been investigated over and over. So far, I think they’ve found 24 cases of potential fraudulent voting.

Vos also knows that if said out loud what he most surely understands in his brain, the Trump mobs would turn on him with a fury greater than that of a thousand suns.

So he hired a former Supreme Court justice to conduct an investigation. Surely a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice could, at a minimum, give the investigation some aura of professionalism and non-partisanship.

Apparently, no one told the speaker that Gableman is an idiot.

His “investigation,” carried out in a strip-mall office, has been a non-stop embarrassment. He has threatened the mayors of major cities with jail. He has recommended decertifying the election (wouldn’t you think a Supreme Court justice might know you can’t do that?). The whole thing has been a laughingstock.

Now, we read reports that Trump threw a big party at his Mar-a-Lago golf estate to introduce a film asserting that Mark Zuckerberg gave money to Wisconsin cities in the hopes of increasing Democratic turnout.

He was greeted with a standing ovation. Trump praised him for the “great job” he is doing.

I don’t know: Gableman just doesn’t seem like an impartial jurist to me. If Vos wanted to spend a million dollars (the contracted amount is less but the investigation continues) to promote Trump conspiracy theories, he could have found more bang for the buck by hiring a more competent investigator.

Instead, we have a guy who finds it suspicious that voters in Madison and Milwaukee support Democrats and, I suppose, that the sun rises in the East.

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