You’ve seen it in the past. It’s almost predictable. You pick up the morning paper and look through the headlines. Later in the day a Republican lawmaker comes up with another idea to regulate something or other.

It’s a scene that plays over and over in Republican politics and this morning there was an obvious one.

GOP legislators have spent a ton of time harping about election fraud in Milwaukee but even though United States Attorney Stephen Biskupic has said that there is no known widespread fraud he can find in Milwaukee, the GOP continues to harp. (There’s a bit of irony in the fact that Biskupic is a Republican too.) But reactionaries like Jeff Stone (R-Greenfield) and Mark Gundrum (R-New Berlin) seem to jump on any opportunity to get their mugs in the news. To a lesser extent State Senator Alberta Darling does, but her forte’ seems to focus more on anything having to do with sex or children.

So this morning when I opened up the newspaper to find a picture of a burka-clad Afghani woman showing her registration card in order to vote I would have liked to think about how democracy is finally starting to work there but it was Stone and Gundrum who came to mind. Stone and Gundrum are hoping to bring post-Taliban Afghanistan politics to Wisconsin by requiring all voters to have a picture ID. This, despite the fact that there is no widespread corruption and no widespread voting fraud in our region.

So why? It’s politics. Pure politics.

When Stone and GOP party chairman Rick Graber held a press conference in front of the Milwaukee home of a man who is studying to be a priest, they inferred that he was guilty of fraud. But it was Stone and Graber who were the frauds that day. The soon-to-be priest had not voted twice. But at the end of the day, the Republicans still got their mugs in front of the cameras. They still stood in Milwaukee and told inferred that fraud was a Milwaukee problem.

So if Stone, Gundrum or Darling, the regions most reactionary lawmakers, say that even the Afghanis are requiring photo ID’s and therefore we should, I wouldn’t be shocked.