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Here’s something everyone in Wisconsin should check out in those long hours at home. You need to take a good, hard look at the justices controlling the Wisconsin Supreme Court who exert so much control over your daily lives and your laws.
Interest should be at an all-time high since those justices forced tens of thousands of voters to stand in long lines last month to vote in primary, state and local elections during a deadly pandemic. The night before the election, the court voted 4-2 to block an attempt by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to delay the election for two months to protect public health and allow everyone to vote safely by mail. So far, state health authorities say 71 voters and poll workers contracted COVID-19.
The vote would have been 5-2, but Justice Daniel Kelly, a reliable rightwing vote, recused himself because he was on the ballot. Voters expressed their opinion of the lopsided political extremism on the court by electing Kelly’s challenger Madison Judge Jill Karofsky by 11 percentage points.
Wisconsin makes it easy for voters to see for themselves exactly how brazenly partisan their court has become. WisconsinEye, a privately funded cable channel and website, provides video of court hearings. Spoiler alert: The most recent one from last week will directly affect the lives of every Wisconsinite and it’s pretty appalling. But you’ll have to wait until almost exactly halfway through before much of anything happens.
Pandemic, What Pandemic?
The Republican-friendly majority justices didn’t really need to question Atty. Ryan Walsh representing Republican legislators suing Evers and his health secretary Andrea Palm for issuing emergency stay-at-home orders closing businesses and schools through May 26. They were just waiting to jump down the throat of Asst. Atty. Gen. Colin Roth, representing Evers and Palm.
Roth’s case is pretty easy too. He simply argued the state legislature itself explicitly granted to Evers and Palm all the powers they exercised. There’s no reason for legislators to be in court. If the legislature wants to change the law, it should simply change it. This actually should be the easiest case ever to come before the Wisconsin Supreme Court because—get thi —Roth is right.
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At a time of widespread fear over HIV and AIDS in 1981, the legislature wrote into the powers of the state Department of Health Services: “The department may authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.” Not only that, but “The department may close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics.”
The problem for Republicans, of course, is they’ve dishonestly gerrymandered a legislative majority, but it’s not big enough to override a veto by Evers. That’s why it’s fascinating to watch the majority Supreme Court justices frantically search for some way to avoid enforcing a clearly written law and provide another win for Republicans over Evers.
Extreme Rhetoric
Justice Rebecca Bradley, the most politically extreme rightwing justice, led the attack on Roth and the governor’s stay-at-home order with the same over-the-top rhetoric as all those protesters carrying assault weapons and waving signs about government tyranny by Democratic governors in capitals around the country.
“Where in the Constitution did the people of Wisconsin confer authority on a single, unelected cabinet secretary to compel almost six million people to stay at home and close their businesses and face imprisonment if they don’t comply?” Bradley asked. “Isn’t it the very definition of tyranny for one person to order others to be imprisoned for going to work, among other ordinarily lawful activities?”
Bradley compared “safer-at-home” to the shamefully racist U.S. incarceration of 110,000 Japanese, 60% of them U.S. citizens, in concentration camps on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor. “Could the secretary [Palm] under this broad delegation of legislative power… order people out of their homes into centers where they are properly socially distanced to combat this pandemic?” Bradley asked. Roth’s simple answer: No.
Finally, Bradley resorted to an argument even President Trump has abandoned that the deadliest U.S. pandemic in more than a century is no different from the flu. “The government could step in and do this… every single flu season every year,” Bradley claimed. Not if it wanted to stay in office.
After Bradley relentlessly pounded Roth, Chief Justice Peggy Roggensack stirred her own public outrage by dismissing what are now more than 1,800 coronavirus infections and at least 18 deaths in Brown County. She said they were tied to meatpacking, an industry employing many Latinos and African Americans, adding: “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”
Karofsky joins the court Aug. 1. The next election isn’t until 2023 when Roggensack’s term expires. Wisconsin voters need to aware of their supreme court’s partisan corruption through the Walker years and keep electing justices who follow the law instead of their own rightwing biases.
