Image via Wisconsin State Legislature - wisconsin.gov
Wisconsin State Assembly districts map
Wisconsin State Assembly districts map
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is finally ending 15 years of corrupt gerrymandering that assured lopsided Republican control of the Legislature in an evenly divided state and Republicans are freaking out. They’ve never had to face fair voting before.
Republican leaders are desperate to get their appeal to the equally corrupt Trumped-up U.S. Supreme Court before the Assembly and half of the Senate have to run for reelection in 2024 in fair voting districts. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos confidently declared: “The U.S. Supreme Court will have the last word.”
Perhaps no one has told Vos the extreme, rightwing supermajority on the Supreme Court these days strongly supports states’ rights. It’s eager to allow Republican legislators, governors and supreme courts to enforce their own laws without any interference from President Biden’s federal government or the federal courts.
Here’s even worse news for Vos. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority decision specifically forbidding federal courts from getting involved in state gerrymandering cases even if voting districts were so corrupt millions of voters cast meaningless votes having no effect on the outcome of elections.
Invitation to Gerrymander
“Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” Roberts wrote. “But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’ does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.”
It was an early warning the Roberts court, with a new Republican-appointed majority, would no longer be guided by democratic principles. It was also an open invitation to state legislators to corruptly gerrymander voting to their hearts’ content.
Wisconsin Republicans were way ahead of him. The 2010 racist Tea Party midterm backlash to President Obama put Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative majorities in control of state redistricting after the census. They drew one of the nation’s most corrupt voting maps creating two-thirds Republican legislatures even when voters cast more votes for Democratic Assembly and Senate candidates statewide.
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The extreme 2011 Wisconsin gerrymandering was so corrupt that after the 2020 census Republicans had difficulty topping it even with Roberts egging them on. They resorted to such brazen dishonesty the newly elected Supreme Court majority would have committed an impeachable offense if the justices hadn’t declared their gerrymandering unconstitutional.
It's hard work for Republicans to create distorted, comical shapes to pack as many Democratic voters into the fewest possible voting districts and spread all the rest into widely scattered Republican districts where they’ll never be able to elect anyone to represent them. So, Republicans simply ignored the state constitutional requirement that voting districts be compact and contiguous.
Swiss Cheese Districts
More than half of the 99 current Assembly districts and 21 of 33 Senate districts look like Swiss cheese with holes knocked out represented by a different legislator or are broken into disconnected puzzle pieces. Nobody ever said gerrymandering was pretty.
“Wisconsin is the only state that has anything that looks anything like this,” said attorney Mark Gaber, representing Democrats. “This shocks people across the country who look at this map.”
Republican legislators during the debate over the maps argued there should be a broader definition of contiguous that includes land mass that does not actually touch. That would be a pretty funny definition since it’s exactly the same as the definition of non-contiguous. Are these the same Republicans who want courts to enforce the original language of our founding fathers in the Constitution?
After failing in his attempt to impeach newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz to prevent her from hearing the gerrymandering case, Vos now has fantasies of the U.S. Supreme Court forcing her to recuse herself. Sorry, Robin. The Supreme Court’s not touching recusal of justices with a 100-foot pole.
Embarrassed on the Bench
The court has been embarrassed by multiple revelations of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito failing to recuse themselves from cases involving their billionaire financial benefactors. Thomas is also under pressure to recuse himself from election cases because of his wife Ginni’s presence in the crowd on January 6 and her political efforts to overturn Biden’s election.
The court’s only official response was adopting a voluntary ethics code in name only with no enforcement procedure for violations and allowing each justice to decide for themselves whether to recuse.
If Republicans were smart, which they aren’t, they would quit wasting time expecting the Supreme Court to rescue them from democracy. Wisconsin voters want a state legislature that represents them. That’s why they elected the three justices who flipped the state Supreme Court to a progressive, pro-democracy majority by double digits.
If Republicans refuse to negotiate with Gov. Tony Evers to create fair voting districts, the state Supreme Court intends to hire independent experts to produce fair maps. State Republicans haven’t run in fair elections for a decade and half. The ones who succeed will need some new political skills. It’s doubtful Robin Vos will be one of them.
