Photo credit: Rick Wood
As a liberal, I was happy to see Justice Rebecca Dallet’s landslide election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court hailed nationally as more evidence of a growing Blue Wave that many folks desperately hope will create a real check in November on a dangerously ignorant, racist president. But as a journalist, I realized there was something not quite right about the national media’s repeated description of Judge Dallet’s victory as the triumph of a liberal candidate over a conservative one; technically, state supreme court races in Wisconsin are non-partisan.
Yeah, I know. In the increasingly ugly elections to the court in recent years, that often was only a technicality. Over the past decade, the media usually wasn’t far from wrong when describing one candidate as liberal and the other as conservative simply based on the politically polarized voters supporting them. But in judicial races, liberal is an extremely relative term.
Despite what you hear on right-wing talk radio, the judiciary is by definition a conservative profession. The career path to a judgeship almost always goes through the prosecutor’s office. Very rarely does a defense attorney ever become a judge.
Rebecca Dallet was actually the candidate in the race who followed that conventional conservative route to the state supreme court. Her qualifications included spending a decade as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and on loan to the U.S. attorney, followed by another decade as a judge. All judges should be fair-minded, decent people like Dallet, but most of a judge’s time is spent convicting and incarcerating offenders. It’s a stretch to call that liberal.
Synonymous with Dishonesty and Corruption
Dallet’s election opponent Michael Screnock’s more dubious credentials were very different. But there’s no question he was far more conservative—at least as conservatism is currently defined within the Republican Party. But therein lies the problem. What Republicans call conservatism these days is so twisted and extreme that it’s becoming virtually indistinguishable from dishonesty, corruption and bigotry.
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Screnock was appointed a judge in 2015 by Republican Gov. Scott Walker as a reward for the novice attorney’s partisan work for a Republican law firm defending Walker’s destruction of union bargaining rights and helping to draw corruptly gerrymandered Wisconsin voting districts that were thrown out by a federal court as unconstitutional.
The dishonest redistricting by Screnock’s law firm so distorted voting in the 2012 election won by incumbent President Barack Obama in Wisconsin that, even though Republicans received only 48% of the vote statewide, they won 60 seats in the state assembly compared to only 39 for Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court currently is deciding whether Wisconsin’s gerrymandering was so extreme that it denied citizens their constitutional right to vote and elect their own representatives.
Screnock’s fundamental disregard for constitutional rights has a long history. As a student at UW-Madison, he was arrested twice in 1989 for attempting to physically block women from entering an abortion clinic (abortion being a constitutionally protected right in the U.S. since 1973). During the campaign, Screnock said he had no regrets about illegally trying to prevent women from seeking abortions and saw no reason to recuse himself from abortion rights cases.
Such questionable ethics on Screnock’s part are common among the other members of the so-called conservative majority on Wisconsin’s court. After Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), the state’s richest business lobby, spent more than $10 million to elect a five-to-two, pro-business, conservative majority to the court, that majority passed what it called an “ethics rule.” Nobody else would call it that. It’s a brazenly unethical rule creating an openly corrupt court.
Rewarding Campaign Donors
The rule says justices aren’t required to recuse themselves from cases simply because one of the parties before them—oh, let’s say the WMC—has contributed millions of dollars to elect them to the court. Justices can pay their campaign donors back with decisions worth millions of dollars. Their conflict of interest is obvious to any honest person. And that’s the real problem with dividing judicial candidates—and many other candidates, for that matter—into categories of “liberal” and “conservative” these days.
Republicans have completely discredited conservatism. People don’t believe me any more when I tell them I grew up surrounded by conservative Republicans who were not openly dishonest. They didn’t justify corrupt actions filling their own pockets by the constant stream of provable lies we see coming from the White House and Republican leadership today.
Honest conservatives should care about conserving the fundamental principles of democracy written by our founding fathers who didn’t even realize at the time those beautiful ideals one day would apply to mothers and daughters and the descendants of their slaves and the rich, cultural diversity of immigrants who would build America.
Republicans desperately need to restore integrity to conservatism; honesty and integrity should be embraced across the political spectrum, but that won’t be possible until the Republicans stop intentionally appealing to white supremacists and trying to destroy fundamental principles of democracy and equality.
