Radio talk: Vos says Evers wants ‘lap dogs’ in map drawing process

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s State Assembly speaker, on a Tuesday radio show, said he doesn’t think drawing new political maps will change things.

Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told Jessica McBride on the Dan O’Donnell Show that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is likely to veto any maps drawn and only wants “lap dogs” to do his bidding. The conversation comes in the wake of Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling calling for a redraw.

The court ruled them unconstitutional.

On New Talk 1130 WISN, Vos said, “We are going to make an effort to draw the lines because I fully believe that it should be done by the Legislature. It’s the way that the founders intended it. If you read Article 4 of the Constitution, it says that the Legislature ‘shall apportion.’ It doesn’t say that the court can hire a professor from California. So it’s clearly our job to do that.”

And he awaits Evers’ veto.

“He doesn’t want to have a Legislature that is an equal branch of government, he wants a bunch of people who are lap dogs or whatever he would like,” Vos said.

The court wants new maps by Jan. 12; they are due to the state’s Elections Commission in early February. Vos told the radio station audience he expects a final ruling will come not from within the state, but at the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The only way that they can get a majority in Wisconsin,” Vos said of Democrats, “is to create an octopus or a pizza pie from places like Milwaukee and Madison. That clearly wouldn’t be ‘compact and contiguous.’ But I guess we’ll see if the court actually is going to follow the Constitution’s literal wording, or if they’re going to find a way around that.”