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On Tuesday, April 7, Wisconsin voters will be asked to amend the state constitution again, this time to change the way the state Supreme Court selects its chief justice.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s most senior member automatically becomes the chief justice, according to a constitutional amendment ratified by Wisconsin voters in 1889.
But Republicans want to change that 126-year-old provision so that the seven justices will elect their leader to a two-year term as chief justice.
They’ll need to amend the constitution to do so, and that requires voters to ratify the new amendment.
So, on April 7, voters will be faced with the question: “Election of chief justice. Shall section 4 (2) of article VII of the constitution be amended to direct that a chief justice of the supreme court shall be elected for a two-year term by a majority of the justices then serving on the court?”
Big Business Funds Conservative Justices
The proposed amendment, like all proposed constitutional amendments, needed to pass both houses of the Legislature during two consecutive sessions before it’s placed on a ballot as a public referendum.
This proposed amendment passed the Legislature in November 2013 and again earlier this year. Both times, the measure passed on party-line votes, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats opposed.
Similarly, groups testifying for and against the amendment clustered around traditional allies. Labor and good-government groups such as the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, AFSCME Council 11, Common Cause of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and Citizen Action of Wisconsin all lobbied against it. The only group to lobby in favor of the proposal was the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), the big business lobby that has backed the campaigns of the four conservative, Republican-leaning justices on the court.
According to research by Brendan Fischer at the Center for Media and Democracy, WMC spent at least $7.25 million to elect the four conservative justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. Along with the Wisconsin Realtors Association, it wrote new rules for the court that allow judges and justices to sit on cases that involve campaign donors. The four WMC-backed justices approved those rules, verbatim, in 2010.
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Those four conservative justices are now refusing to recuse themselves from hearing the John Doe cases involving Gov. Scott Walker and his political allies—including WMC.
Targeting Abrahamson
The proposed amendment is widely seen as an attempt to reduce the power of Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who has served as chief since 1996. Abrahamson frequently dissents from the conservative majority and has at times issued blistering critiques of their decisions. For example, Abrahamson was a strong critic of the conservative justices’ decision to shred the state’s open meeting law in an effort to justify the way the Republican Legislature passed Act 10, the 2011 law busting public employee unions. And Prosser, a former Republican legislative leader who is now viewed as the leader of the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, famously called Abrahamson a “total bitch” and threatened to “destroy” her. At the same time, most court watchers, both Democrats and Republicans, agree that Justice Abrahamson is without question the smartest member of the Supreme Court and a fair chief justice.
So it’s not surprising that the Republican Legislature is doing what they can to reduce Abrahamson’s power by changing the state constitution. They’re assuming that the four conservative justices will band together and elect one of their own as chief justice.
Gov. Scott Walker is getting into the attack-Abrahamson action as well. Walker has included language in his proposed budget that would reduce the chief justice’s pay so that it’s equal to the other justices’ salaries. Abrahamson currently makes about $8,000 more than the other members of the court.
