Rape kit legislation shouldn’t be spin doctored

Senate Bill 71, now known as Wisconsin Act 116, is officially signed into law and will hopefully prevent any future backlog of rape kits in the state justice system. It also allows survivors of sexual assault to keep track of where those kits are in the process instead of waiting for years with no word about whether justice will ever come.

A Marion man was found guilty in 2019 for the sexual assault of a teenager in 2012, and the reason justice came seven years later was because Wisconsin had a backlog of rape kits totaling 6,800, and the rape kit for this case wasn’t tested until 2017. Once the backlog became public knowledge, the issue became a political football that eventually was resolved with all the kits being processed. However, there was nothing in place to keep such a backlog from occurring again until Senate Bill 71 came along.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party jumped on the news about the bill being signed into law, crediting Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul for making this happen. The press release sent out to media highlighted quotes from both men from Up North News praising the legislation.

However, the press release fails to recognize that the bill was authored by Republican legislators, including our own Sen. Robert Cowles. In fact, SB 71 had 10 Republican sponsors in the Assembly and four in the Senate, while co-sponsorship from the Democratic side of the aisle was four members of the Assembly and only one in the Senate.

It’s quite distasteful that the Democratic Party handlers are continuing to spin-doctor government acts to make it look like only their side is taking action. It continues to perpetuate the great divide affecting this state and the nation as a whole that one party is the saving grace that will deliver us from the darkness and the other party will bring about the end times and destroy humanity as a whole.

The press release also failed to note a quote from Democratic Sen. Melissa Agard from Madison that pointed out SB 71 was being moved forward from both sides of the aisle: “While it sometimes feels in this body and in this building that we’re destined to continue operating solely within our own parties, I am hopeful by what I see here today. We’re showing our colleagues and other committees and in other bodies how it is we can do better.”

Granted, we’re approaching an election year, and since there are Republican majorities in both chambers, it behooves the Democratic Party to do what it can to get more of its own into legislative seats. However, taking full credit for something like this is exactly the kind of partisan idiocy that the regular folks of the state and country are tired of seeing. The main point of this legislation is that it will fast-lane efforts to pursue justice for those impacted by rape and sexual assault, and posturing should not be acceptable in the case of something like this.

In all fairness, the Republicans are not saints when it comes to moving the legislation forward. Similar legislation made it unanimously through the Senate and had 56 bipartisan sponsors in the Assembly before that chamber’s GOP leaders decided to pad the bill with immigration and school choice legislation, which has nothing to do with testing rape kits. Thankfully, Republicans didn’t try to pull such an asinine maneuver this time, and we now have a law on the books.

SB 71 should be an indication to both sides of the aisle that meaningful improvements to the state and how it’s run can happen, and it all comes down to recognizing that there’s a problem. Letting rape kits languish is something that should never have happened in Wisconsin, as it discourages victims from coming forward and telling what happened to law enforcement officials and allows perpetrators to continue committing crimes. Both Republicans and Democrats should be praised for putting safeguards into place to keep justice from being delayed.

Perhaps the Democratic Party — and the Republican Party, while it’s at it — should retire their spin doctoring publicity juggernauts, because they’re not doing anything to improve the state, and they’re certainly not bringing people together. Further press releases like the one released this week only serve to divide and alienate, and we’ve had quite enough of that. Instead of pointing to the heroes, point to the good itself that’s being done. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who did it; it just matters that it got done.

Lee Pulaski is the city editor for NEW Media. Readers can contact him at lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com.