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Supreme Court
The detailed criminal indictment of Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators in Georgia makes it clear Wisconsin Republicans played a much more central role nationally in the attempt to overthrow President Biden’s election than many realized.
No surprise, one of the driving forces behind Trump’s attempt to overthrow democracy was Milwaukee’s ultra-rightwing Bradley Foundation, which has funded far right organizations and promoted white supremacy locally and nationally for decades.
The direct connection between Trump’s violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, and the reactionary Bradley Foundation is Kenneth Chesebro, the so-called brains to use the term loosely behind Trump’s fake electors scheme in Wisconsin and six other states President Biden won.
In 2016, Chesebro, a Harvard-educated attorney from Wisconsin Rapids, joined the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the rightwing law firm founded by the Bradley Foundation five years earlier. Its primary purpose locally was to shape the political agendas of the corruptly gerrymandered Republican legislature and the rightwing majority controlling the state Supreme Court for 15 years until frustrated voters elected four pro-democracy justices to create a new majority.
Masterminding the Fake Electors
Before the election indictments by federal prosecutor Jack Smith and Georgia district attorney Fani Willis identified Chesebro as the architect of Trump’s fake electors plot, few Americans had ever heard of him.
But when Chesebro attended the organizational meeting of Wisconsin’s 10 fake Trump electors in Madison’s state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, those phony electors were following detailed instructions laid out in memos from Chesebro to try to make the fraudulent government documents they were signing appear as authentic as possible. The other 72 fraudulent Trump electors in six other states Biden won were doing the same.
By then, Chesebro had dropped the phony Republican cover story that the fake electors were created in case Trump won any of his state or federal lawsuits claiming the election was stolen. That didn’t apply in Wisconsin anyway.
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out all Trump’s lawsuits several hours before the fake electors met. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who usually voted with the court’s rightwing majority, refused to join his three pro-Trump colleagues who voted to ignore the state’s certified election results. Instead, Hagedorn wrote the decision joined by what were then three more progressive justices upholding Biden’s victory, declaring: “In these hallowed halls, the law must rule.”
The Trump election indictments cited a Chesbro memo dated Dec. 6, 2020, that revealed the fake electors’ scheme never had anything to do Trump’s lawsuits claiming election fraud without any evidence. The plan all along was simply to create two slates of electors in seven states—Biden’s legitimate electors and Trump’s fake ones—and for Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the congressional counting of electoral votes, to throw out Biden’s votes and accept Trump’s fraudulent ones.
Unconstitutional Law
Chesebro’s memo called it “a bold, controversial strategy.” Smith and Willis call it an unconstitutional election crime against democracy that would have disenfranchised millions of American voters in seven states. It failed because Pence refused to violate the Constitution.
Trump’s openly racist 2016 campaign for the presidency made him a prime candidate for the Bradley Foundation’s financial support from the beginning.
In 1994, the Bradley Foundation support for white supremacy became public with its funding of The Bell Curve, co-authored by Charles Murray. It was a notoriously racist academic study citing as evidence of the genetic inferiority of African Americans that they scored on average 15 points lower than white people on I.Q. tests created by white people. In 2016, the foundation awarded Murray a lifetime achievement award and $250,000 for “outstanding contributions consistent with our mission.”
In 2021, New Yorker investigative reporter Jane Mayer revealed in “The Big Money Behind the Big Lie” the Bradley Foundation distributed millions of dollars in grants throughout the country trying to overturn Biden’s election defeat of Trump. It funded rewriting election laws disqualifying and intimidating legitimate voters and creating ways for Republicans to manipulate election results. Its biggest crime against democracy was Chesebro, an attorney for its nonprofit law firm, creating all those fake presidential electors.
Mayer wrote the Bradley Foundation, “a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in the current struggles over American democracy.” She cited it as example the growing threat from rightwing extremists funded by “the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries.”
Wisconsinites know that better than anybody. Three of the state’s biggest political donors are billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein who funded the rightwing political careers of Scott Walker and Ron Johnson. All three were richly rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal tax cuts.
Wisconsin voters know what to do about it too. Turn out in record numbers in 2024 just like they’ve done in three straight elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022 to vote against every Republican who supports the criminal destruction of American democracy.
