Photo credit: Judge Brian Hagedorn
Last week an emerging new majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, once one of the nation’s most corruptly partisan Republican state courts, rejected three attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to throw out hundreds of thousands of legally cast votes to overturn Trump’s Wisconsin loss to Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden.
But if you think Trump was disappointed, you’re mistaken. That’s because Trump’s election challenges aren’t really intended to reverse Biden’s decisive victory. Filing absurd losing lawsuits are simply one more Trump scam that so far has duped gullible Trump supporters out of more than $200 million, most of which will go directly into Trump’s pockets. Trump’s ridiculous charges of vote fraud without any evidence have been rejected more than 40 times nationally by Republican and Democratic judges including Trump’s own appointees. But they’re a goldmine for Trump.
Trump has raised $207 million in the month since Election Day with more than 500 increasingly frantic fundraising appeals, dwarfing the $81 million financial haul from his best pre-election month of September. That’s why within hours of the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, Trump filed multiple new state lawsuits to keep the scam going.
Trump’s dishonest appeals lie about where the money is going. They seek contributions to an “Election Defense Fund” that doesn’t exist. Anyone who reads the fine print learns the first 75% of every contribution to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee will go to Trump’s new Save America Leadership Political Action Committee with the remaining 25% going to the Republican National Committee. Leadership PACs, only lightly regulated, are held by many current and former political officials. The funds can’t be used directly on campaigns or campaign-related litigation, but as ex-president Trump is free to use the money for almost any other political expenses of his choosing.
Restoring the Rule of Law
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Wisconsin Justice Brian Hagedorn, chief legal counsel to Republican Gov. Scott Walker for five years, may be an unlikely savior to create a new majority restoring the rule of law to the state’s radically partisan Supreme Court. But even though Hagedorn was elected in 2019 as a rightwing religious opponent of Roe v. Wade and equal rights for the LGBTQ community, Hagedorn publicly declared his intention to reform the court earlier this year.
Hagedorn wrote a stinging dissent in May after a court decision affecting public health in the pandemic by a lame-duck Republican-leaning court majority that included Dan Kelly, defeated in April by Madison Judge Jill Karofsky, who wasn’t sworn in until Aug. 1. That 4-3 court decision abolished the powers of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and his health department to protect the lives of Wisconsinites in the pandemic despite state statutes clearly granting such powers. “We are a court of law,” Hagedorn wrote. “The legislature may have buyer’s remorse for the breadth of discretion it gave to (the governor’s health department). But those are the laws it drafted; we must read them faithfully whether we like them or not.”
Hagedorn and Karofsky now form a new 4-3 majority with Justices Rebecca Dallet, elected in 2018, and Ann Walsh Bradley, elected in 1995, the only remaining member of Wisconsin’s last progressive court under Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson that ended in 2008. Hagedorn wrote all three decisions by the court’s new majority refusing to overturn the results of Wisconsin’s election. He called an outrageous case brought by Kewaunee County Trump supporters attempting to throw out all 3.3 million presidential votes and allow the corruptly gerrymandered Republican legislature to declare Trump the winner of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes a “real stunner.”
Bombastic Extremist Judges
“We are invited to invalidate the entire presidential election in Wisconsin by declaring it ‘null’ — yes, the whole thing,” Hagedorn wrote. “This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread. The loss of trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable.” At another point, Hagedorn declared: “In these hallowed halls, the law must rule.”
Hagedorn’s former Republican colleagues on the court did not welcome being relegated to the minority. Chief Justice Peggy Roggensack wrote a dissent joined by Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler, the other minority justices: “This is the third time that a majority of this court has turned its back on pleas from the public to address a matter of statewide concern.”
Rebecca Bradley, the most extreme rightwing justice on the court, wrote an even more bombastic dissent joined by the minority justices to the refusal to hear the Trump campaign’s attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters. Bradley called the decision “a death blow to democracy. The majority’s failure to act leaves an indelible stain on our most recent election.”
The new court minority apparently doesn’t understand the democratic concepts of counting every vote and upholding the rule of law Hagedorn wants to bring back to the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court.
