On the campaign trail, the progressive candidate for Wisconsin’s supreme court, Janet Protasiewicz, has called the state’s legislative maps “rigged” and has predicted the state’s high court will revisit the case if she is elected.
At last week’s debate with conservative candidate Dan Kelly, she prejudged the case:
“The [legislative] map issue is really kind of easy actually. I don’t think anybody thinks those maps are fair,” Protasiewicz said. “That dissent is what I will tell you I agree with,” she added, pointing to a state supreme court case from 2022.
“She just told you that she’s going to steal the legislative authority and use that in the courts. Fairness of the maps is a political question,” Kelly countered. “Political questions belong in the legislature — we all know that since grade school with Schoolhouse Rock.”
As Collin Levy argues in the Wall Street Journal, the issue is much more complicated than Protasiewicz would have you believe:
In 2021 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature, and the state Supreme Court sided with the governor. Lawmakers objected and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard the cases in 2022. The high court approved the Evers congressional maps but struck down the Evers state legislative maps on grounds that they violated the federal Voting Rights Act.
In a per curiam opinion, the justices wrote that under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, “districting maps that sort voters on the basis of race . . . ‘cannot be upheld unless they are narrowly tailored to achieving a compelling state interest.’ ”
The legislative maps were remanded to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which redrew them as instructed. Mr. Evers’s congressional maps were retained as is. But national Democrats now say the goal should be for a Protasiewicz Supreme Court to revisit all of them—including the ones written by their own Democratic governor and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. . . .
Democrats say it is impossible for them to win a majority in Wisconsin with the current maps. They point to the GOP’s 10-seat majority in the state Senate and its 29-seat majority in the Assembly. How can that be, they wonder, since Wisconsin has a Democratic governor and is a swing state in U.S. presidential elections? It has to be the maps.
But anyone familiar with Wisconsin’s partisan voter distribution knows that the state is a red sea of Republicans surrounding the two huge blue islands of Milwaukee and Madison. Wisconsin’s Constitution requires that legislative districts keep cities and counties intact as much as possible. Drawing legislative maps that retain some geographical integrity creates more Republican districts.