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US Constitution with gavel
Who could have predicted that in 2022 the U.S Supreme Court would begin destroying nearly 50 years of legal protections for a woman’s constitutional right to end an unwanted pregnancy by considering allowing individual states to decide for themselves whether to honor constitutional rights? Wasn’t that issue settled more than 150 years ago in a bloody Civil War?
Actually, Wisconsin and many other states could have predicted that those questions might be reopened when the Supreme Court refused in 2019 to do anything to protect voting rights in states like Wisconsin after their legislatures corruptly distorted democracy through blatantly dishonest political gerrymandering.
The 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed “such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’” but then irrationally added that “does not mean the solution lies with the federal judiciary.”
Dishonest GOP Majorities
Roberts ordered federal courts to stop interfering with states like Wisconsin when Republicans gerrymandered dishonest Republican majorities in their legislatures that didn’t represent the intentions of voters statewide by rendering hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes meaningless in elections.
A law firm hired by Wisconsin Republicans in 2011 worked in secret using sophisticated computer algorithms to perfect “packing and cracking”—redrawing boundaries of legislative and congressional districts packing Democratic voters into the fewest possible election districts and scattering all the rest into multiple Republican districts where they would always remain a permanent minority.
The corruption of democracy was immediately apparent in 2012 when even though Republican legislators won only 48% of votes statewide, they won a lopsided majority of 60 seats in the Assembly and a smaller majority in the state Senate. They’ve won 60% of legislative seats ever since even in 2018 when Democrats swept every statewide election and in 2020 when Biden defeated Trump statewide.
Radical Supreme Court
A decade later after a new census, voting rights and other democratic rights Americans thought were constitutionally protected are now under even greater threat by a radical Supreme Court. The court now has a lopsided 6-3 Republican-appointed majority with three new justices appointed by Donald Trump, who sent a violent mob of his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s election.
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And despite that good talking to Justice Roberts gave to states about how dishonest political gerrymandering was “incompatible” with American democracy, a 4-3 Republican-friendly majority on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court has approved the decision by Republican legislators to continue using that outdated, corruptly gerrymandered Republican voting map from 2011 with minimal changes as their model for statewide voting for the next 10 years.
The Wisconsin decision was written by Rebecca Bradley, the court’s most extreme justice. Bradley is former president of the Milwaukee chapter of the rightwing Federalist Society, the same organization that screened Trump’s appointees to Supreme Court to assure their willingness to overturn abortion rights for women and other constitutional rights.
“Claims of political unfairness in the maps present political questions, not legal ones,” Bradley wrote, pretending the partisan Republican court majority only issues legal decisions, not political ones. That’s demonstrably false. The court nearly always sides with the Republican legislature against Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. That started even before Evers took office when it approved a large package of lame-duck Republican legislation stripping Evers of the powers of previous governors.
Rare Decision
A rare anti-Republican decision came last December when Trump’s state supporters attempted to steal the election for him by asking the court to throw out all 3.3 million legally cast votes and allow the gerrymandered Republican legislature to declare Trump the winner of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. That was too much for conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn to stomach. He broke from his rightwing colleagues to prevent it. Bradley exposed her own twisted political views by condemning Hagedorn’s opposition to election theft as “a death blow to democracy.” Not the American democracy most of us have always lived under that used to be supported by both political parties.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin won’t have a chance to replace any of the politically deranged members of the court majority until April 2023 with the expiration of the term of Chief Justice Pat Roggensack, now 81.
Tragically, Americans today may never again live under a U.S. Supreme Court majority that supports all the hard-won constitutional protections for equal rights and opportunities and free and fair elections that were once the hallmarks of our democracy. It could take decades before we have a more fairly balanced Supreme Court again.
Despite what Chief Justice Roberts wrote in 2019, the solution to the destruction of American democracy has to lie with federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court that makes the final decisions on the law of the land. That’s why appointments are for life to shield them from petty political concerns.
State judges like those on the Wisconsin Supreme Court who run for election can’t be trusted to rise above the politics of the moment.
