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Wisconsin and American flags
There’s a very good reason for all the national and statewide attention focused on what is usually a low-turnout, off-year, April election for one opening on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
It is the first opportunity for a majority of voters anywhere in America to fight back against a radical, rightwing judiciary hellbent on abolishing constitutional rights that have been protected for decades in our democracy.
In a single term before his resounding defeat, President Trump appointed an extreme rightwing supermajority to the U.S. Supreme Court that abruptly demolished 50 years of constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about abortion.
American history doesn’t move backwards 50 years at time. Our democracy was founded by wealthy, white, male, property owners who were the only ones with any explicitly guaranteed rights. But ever since, our nation’s courts have extended equal rights, equal treatment under the law and protection from discrimination to all Americans regardless of race, gender, income or sexuality.
Protect Our Rights
There’s another extremely important reason the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between Janet Protasiewicz committed to protecting constitutional rights and Daniel Kelly who’s out to destroy them has excited such widespread public interest.
At a time when Americans everywhere are concerned about how long their rights are going to be endangered by a hostile Supreme Court, Wisconsin has the first opportunity in 15 years to finally rid its state of a corrupt, rightwing Republican majority on its own high court.
In 2018 and 2020, by double-digit margins a majority of state voters replaced partisan, rightwing extremists on their highest court with ethical Supreme Court justices upholding the constitution. By electing Protasiewicz, they can finish the job by creating a new 4-3 court majority to protect their constitutional rights and equal justice.
Amid the constant flood of millions of dollars in television attack ads by partisans on both sides, voters statewide know exactly what’s at stake in the election and who the candidates really are. Another record voter turnout is expected in the final election on April 4. That’s bad news for Kelly and good news for democracy.
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In the record primary turnout of nearly a million voters, Protasiewicz won more than twice as many votes as Kelly. Kelly is the candidate voters previously defeated by l0 percentage points in 2020 for a full term after he served a four-year court appointment by Gov. Scott Walker.
Kelly has become even more deeply involved since in attempting to overthrow President Biden’s state election victory over Trump. Kelly says he’s running for the court again because rightwing Justice Brian Hagedorn’s refused to join the court’s election deniers to throw out the state’s election results so Republican legislators could declare Trump the winner. If he’d been on the court, he would have thrown out all 3.3 million presidential votes cast in Wisconsin.
Kelly’s Fake Electors
Republicans also paid Kelly $120,000 to advise them on election issues including Trump’s illegal scheme to create “fake electors” submitting fraudulent federal documents claiming to be “duly elected” to cast the state’s electoral votes for Trump. Bad advice. Former party chairman Andrew Hitt and nine other state Republicans now face possible prosecution for attempting to defraud the government.
The only televised debate between Protasiewicz and Kelly clearly identified the most important issues in the race as protecting voting rights and restoring abortion rights. Most Americans always thought women’s reproductive rights would be constitutionally protected. Protasiewicz has no qualms about supporting women’s rights to make their own decisions about their bodies, health care and how many children to have.
Kelly avoids honestly answering the question, but everyone knows how he’ll vote. Kelly’s been endorsed by the extreme anti-abortion groups Wisconsin Right to Life and Pro-Life Wisconsin and has campaigned with a rightwing Brookfield pastor who calls the murder of abortion providers “justifiable homicide.”
The Wisconsin court race is just the first state battle to come around the country to repair Trump’s damage to our democracy. In case you haven’t identified what’s happening yet, Trump and all the other Republicans running for president, just like the Republican justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court, want to create the America that would have existed if the South had won the Civil War.
The South claimed they weren’t fighting for slavery or against equal rights. They were fighting for state’s rights. The supercharged Trump Supreme Court is trying that out by abolishing constitutional protections for the rights of women to make decisions about their own lives. Allowing each state to decide how much freedom women should have is the beginning of the end for the beautiful American ideal of a democracy in which we’re all treated equally with unalienable rights.
Fortunately, Wisconsin appears ready to elect a new majority on its state Supreme Court committed to restoring constitutional rights and enforcing equal treatment under the law until the U.S. Supreme Court stops moving in the opposite direction.
