We were struck by a front-page story in Tuesday’s New York Times, entitled “Stung by Loss, Legislators Try To Shift Power.” Could it be that The Times was finally acknowledging what The Jewish Press has maintained since the 2016 presidential election – that the Democrats are trying to neutralize President Trump’s electoral victory by engaging in an across-the-board “political resistance”?
To our dismay, the opposite was the case. That is, the story reported on Republican legislators who are reportedly trying to undermine an incoming Democratic governor. Equally dismaying was the negative spin on the Republicans’ actions, which the Times never sees in Democratic resistance to Trump.
Here are three paragraphs from the story:
When Democrats governor’s office in Wisconsin, it was one of the party’s most celebrated midterm successes in regaining power in the states. Now Republicans are striking back moving to slash the power of the new governor even before he takes the oath of office.
Democrats reacted with fury, crowding the halls of the State Capitol in Madison on Monday and accusing the Republicans of trying to undo an election they had lost. It was only the latest such Republican effort across the country to try to use legislative action to counter blows the party suffered at the polls. For Wisconsin, a state that both parties will urgently vie to win in 2020 elections, it was one more sign of the ferocious partisan split that has rippled through the state in recent years.
“It’s a power grab,” State Senator Jon Erpenbach, a Democrat, said before a hearing on the package of bills that includes restrictions on the incoming governor’s ability to shift how public benefits programs are run, and on his authority to set the rules that determine how state laws are carried out. ‘They lost and they’re throwing a fit.”
We searched for even a hint of tongue and cheek in this story but found none. The irony of complaining about resistance to a duly-elected representative seemed totally lost on The Times.