The Wisconsin supreme court has officially flipped to the left with the confirmation of a hard-left justice.
The Wisconsin supreme court, long a bastion of conservative jurisprudence in the home state of the Republican Party and progressivism both, has officially flipped to the left with the confirmation of a hard-left justice. Janet Protasiewicz defeated Dan Kelly in April of this year.
Dominic Pino framed the race’s vast expense and Trump-associated messaging in a recent Jolt:
The $42 million in combined spending was by far the most ever spent on a state-supreme-court race, nearly tripling the previous record from Illinois in 2004. Protasiewicz had a comfortable advantage in this area as well, spending $23.3 million compared to Kelly’s $17.6 million. Kelly tried to distance himself from Trump, but progressives’ efforts to tar him for having provided legal advice to Republicans litigating Trump’s loss in 2020 stuck with voters.
The Wisconsin GOP and its voters are addicted to bad candidates and to losing, so it’s no surprise that the seat was lost (though the margin of eleven points was somewhat shocking given the frequency of tight races in the Badger State). But this loss, unlike the failed campaign to wrest the Wisconsin executive branch from a seemingly easy target in Tony Evers and Co. in 2022, will have real consequences for the legislature, pro-life laws, and checking state power.
Patrick Marley of the Washington Post reports:
Within days, the new majority stripped duties from the court’s conservative chief justice and fired its administrative director, a conservative former judge who once ran for the court. The abrupt changes prompted the chief justice to accuse her liberal colleagues of engaging in “nothing short of a coup.” Before long, Republican lawmakers threatened to impeach the court’s newest member.Liberal groups, long accustomed to seeing the court as hostile terrain, quickly maneuvered for potential victories on a string of major issues. They filed lawsuits to try to redraw the state’s legislative districts, which heavily favor Republicans. And the Democratic attorney general sought to speed up a case challenging a 19th-century law that has kept doctors from providing abortions in Wisconsin.
Whatever credit Trump deserves for securing Supreme Court justices that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, he deserves equal denunciation for how poisonous he’s made Republican state parties and their candidates.
Remember: Wisconsin was red in all three branches until 2018. Now two are blue, and their power to edit redistricting (and budgets) threatens the GOP’s hold on a legislature that came within a few seats of a supermajority as well as the state’s fiscal health.