Despite the lack of attention from much of the media, the election of a justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court next Tuesday is probably even more important than the governor’s election for its long-term consequences to our state.
That may seem hard to believe as Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican-controlled Legislature continue to pass terrible law after terrible law destroying the rights of working people, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters and gutting the funding of education in Wisconsin from kindergarten through college.
But at least there’s a chance every four years to get rid of a terrible governor if enough people in the state wake up.
But a state Supreme Court justice is elected to a term that lasts a decade. That’s disastrous when the current Wisconsin Supreme Court has a majority of four justices who’ve made it one of the most corrupt state courts in the nation.
Next week’s election won’t change that, unfortunately. But the re-election of incumbent Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who regularly dissents from the court’s brazenly corrupt majority, is a necessary first step toward cleaning up the court.
That’s because Rock County Circuit Court Judge James Daley, Bradley’s opponent, is eager to expand the court’s shamelessly unethical majority.
Even though judicial races by law are non-partisan, Daley has no qualms about campaigning transparently as a Republican, reporting $7,000 in in-kind contributions from the state Republican Party, campaigning before Republican groups and using party operatives to circulate his literature.
Daley is openly auditioning to become the fifth member of the corrupt majority and continue putting extreme right-wing politics above following the law or upholding the Constitution.
The $10 Million Court Majority
Lest anyone think corruption is too strong a word, the court’s majority justices—Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Pat Roggensack and Annette Ziegler—are getting ready to rule in a case that, although cloaked in secrecy, is generally thought to involve their biggest political donors who’ve spent nearly $10 million to elect all four of them to the court.
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Surely no honest citizen—Republican or Democrat—can claim that’s not a conflict of interest. It legalizes buying off the court. Yet, all four justices have refused to recuse themselves.
The case in question likely involves two special interest groups—Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce—that want to kill once and for all campaign finance laws intended to prevent special interests from making large, secret donations directly to public officials to do their bidding.
Laws requiring public disclosure of donors and placing dollar limits on contributions to candidates are meaningless if Walker can simply direct large donors who want political favors—like, let’s say, Gogebic mining or John Menard—to donate $700,000 and $1.5 million respectively to Wisconsin Club for Growth, which keeps its donors secret and then coordinates with Walker’s campaign to spend millions on his behalf.
That’s the alleged criminal activity prosecutors are pursuing in the stalled John Doe investigation into Walker’s campaign that the state Supreme Court could shut down.
If that were legal, voters would have had no way of knowing that Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce spent $2.6 million to elect Prosser to the court, $2.6 million to elect Ziegler, $2.3 million to elect Gableman and $850,000 to elect Roggensack, according to public records.
That amounts to 76% of all Prosser’s campaign contributions, 69% of Gableman’s, 59% of Ziegler’s and 48% of Roggensack’s.
If you think ethical rules should prevent justices from ruling on cases involving parties making such enormous contributions to elect them, the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with you.
In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in a West Virginia case that “due process” required a state Supreme Court justice to recuse himself when “extreme facts” created a “probability of bias.” Those extreme facts were that a coal company CEO spent $3 million to elect a justice who then ruled in his favor.
After that decision, 45 other states passed judicial standards requiring recusals based on large campaign contributions. The corrupt Wisconsin majority did just the opposite.
They adopted a new rule drafted in part by, you guessed it, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce that blatantly declared that justices couldn’t be required to recuse themselves simply because parties before them contributed to their elections.
So far the only justice with enough integrity to recuse herself in the John Doe case has been Bradley, whose son works for one of the law firms involved.
Not only that, but the Wisconsin court recently cancelled oral arguments in the John Doe case. Why listen to lawyers’ arguments when you already know you’re going to rule in favor of donors who financed your election?
If the media paid more attention to the ethics and honesty of justices elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, perhaps outraged citizens would turn out in large numbers next week to start cleaning up that openly corrupt court.
