MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted Wisconsin Republicans for ramming through a primary election during the coronavirus pandemic as part of an ongoing voter suppression scheme.
The state's GOP House speaker, Robin Vos, appeared on video wearing full medical protective gear telling Wisconsinites that voting was perfectly safe, and the "Morning Joe" host unloaded on him.
"What a clown," Scarborough said. "That actually is the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly in full-on protective gear. This guy who looks like he's in a hazmat suit telling Wisconsin voters that they were, quote, 'incredibly safe' to go out."
Scarborough said the lines of voters wearing masks, gloves and other items to risk their lives to vote was perhaps the most horrific thing he'd seen in U.S. politics.
"Of all the things that I've seen in my 25 years of politics and being associated with politics and reporting on politics," he said, "I don't know that I've ever seen anything as reckless and irresponsible with the public health as what I saw yesterday where Republicans jammed down the throat of Wisconsin voters an election in the middle of a pandemic where they had to stand in lines close to each other, and, yes, you can say this, the Republicans that jammed this election through risked the lives of countless Wisconsin voters and those in other states."
Scarborough said this was the apotheosis of a years-long effort by the Wisconsin GOP to restrict voting rights for the state's black and Hispanic residents.
"This is about a Wisconsin legislature and a Wisconsin Republican Party in Wisconsin that has spent the last decade doing everything they could do to twist and distort voting outcomes and elections," he said. "You don't believe me? In 2018 the numbers here, Democratic candidates won by more than 190,000 votes for the state assembly, right? Pretty much a landslide. Yet the GOP has so gerrymandered and twisted up the state, that despite the fact that Democrats won by 190,000 more votes than Republicans, the GOP held a 64-to-35 advantage in that chamber."
"It's just been an ongoing effort by Wisconsin Republicans to make sure that black voters, to make sure Hispanic voters, to make sure Democratic voters, they don't get their say and that it's not one person, one vote," Scarborough added. "Yesterday was the most extraordinarily reckless thing I've seen in my political life. In the middle of a pandemic, just not waiting till June like every other state, because you know what? They had a Supreme Court seat that they wanted to win. They wanted the Democrats to stay at home, they wanted to win the Supreme Court seat so they could pass more legislation which would disenfranchise more black voters."
