On Tuesday, Feb. 20, Wisconsin will have a primary election for the State Supreme Court. This is theoretically a non-partisan race since candidates do not run under a party banner. Three candidates are vying for this position. The top two vote getters will move on to the Tuesday, April 3, general election.
The incumbent Justice Michael Gableman was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court 10 years ago under the cloud of a racist campaign and the fact that his campaign received more than $2.5 million from dark money special interest groups, many funded by the Koch brothers. His performance on the court was what one would have expected from a rather poorly qualified candidate that was bought by special interest money. We are pleased that he had the dignity to not seek re-election.
Right now, our seven-person State Supreme Court has five “conservatives” and two “liberals.” We desperately need more balance on our top court with more justices who believe in an honest judiciary who were not elected with millions of dollars from right-wing special interest groups.
Of the three candidates, two are highly qualified candidates with different backgrounds and somewhat different positions on some issues. We believe either one—Tim Burns or Rebecca Dallet—would make an excellent addition to our State Supreme Court and a vast improvement over the exiting Gableman. Both Burns and Dallet have distinguished legal careers and are highly respected as individuals of extraordinary integrity, whether or not you agree with them on every issue.
The Shepherd Express is proud to endorse both Tim Burns and Rebecca Dallet. We believe that either Burns or Dallet would make a great contribution to Wisconsin as a Supreme Court Justice.
Tim Burns
Tim Burns is proudly a self-made man. His parents were poor, and they had to drop out of high school to go to work. Though his parents couldn’t give him an academic head start, they instilled good values of hard work, honesty and a strong sense of fairness and justice. After law school, Burns carried his values of fairness and justice into his legal work fighting the huge insurance industry on behalf of average Americans. He is a nationally recognized attorney and a partner at the national law firm of Perkins Coie working out of their Madison offices. He has also served as chairman of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Fair and Impartial Courts.
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Burns is also carrying his progressive values into this Supreme Court race where he is speaking out on the inequities in our economy, the growing concentration of wealth in society and the corrosive role of special interest money. He argues that the court needs to do more to protect our civil rights, workers’ rights, reproductive rights and our natural environment. He has also been vocal about Wisconsin’s disgraceful level of incarceration of people of color. Burns is getting support from both traditional Democrats and from the progressive wing—including many Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Burns and his wife, Pam, live in Middleton where they are raising their three children.
Among the people endorsing Tim Burns are former Congressman Dave Obey, former Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, Congressman Mark Pocan, Marquette Law Professor Ed Fallone and Our Wisconsin Revolution, a liberal political organization inspired by Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
Rebecca Dallet
Rebecca Dallet has spent the past two decades working in the Milwaukee County court system—first as an assistant district attorney (for 11 years) and then as a Circuit Court judge (for 10 years). As both a prosecutor and a judge, she has been involved in thousands of cases and has seen firsthand the challenges of many average Wisconsin citizens struggling to get through difficult times in their lives. She has seen firsthand how a major illness can cause a family to lose its home because the mortgage money had to go to the medical bills and how quickly the opioid crisis can devastate a family and an entire community. As a circuit judge, Dallet has overseen hundreds of both civil and criminal cases and has had to make some very tough decisions as a judge.
Dallet is viewed as a liberal-leaning moderate, and she has been an advocate for women throughout her legal career. As an assistant district attorney, she prosecuted individuals from domestic violence cases to criminal sexual predator cases. She has been highly critical of the State Supreme Court for blatant partisanship, lack of transparency and the corrupting influence of special interest money. She also spoke at last year’s Wisconsin Democratic Convention, criticizing the Supreme Court’s right-wing decision regarding Act 10. She lives in Whitefish Bay with her husband and three daughters.
Dallet has been endorsed by former State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler, as well as more than 200 other judges throughout the state and more than 150 locally elected public servants—including school board members, alderpersons, county supervisors and state legislators.
The Third Candidate
The third candidate, Michael Screnock, has a history of extreme right-wing activism, which resulted in his getting arrested a couple of times in his earlier life. As an attorney, he participated in the drawing of the gerrymandered Wisconsin legislative districts, which a special federal judicial panel has declared unconstitutional. This participation in the blatantly unconstitutionally drawn districts shows a total disregard for any level of fairness and justice.
Screnock also participated on the legal team that defended Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting Act 10. We don’t need another right-wing ideologue on the Wisconsin Supreme Court bought by the likes of the Koch brothers.
