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Supreme Court
Ya think Trump’s rightwing Republican supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court might have arrogantly overestimated their power to destroy a half century of protecting equal rights for women to make their own decisions about their bodies, their health care and their lives?
Ever since three new Trump justices helped roll back five decades of reproductive freedom for women last summer, American voters have turned out in record numbers in state elections throughout the country to restore those rights.
The latest was the enormous Wisconsin vote electing Justice Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court by 11 points over the nasty rightwing abortion opponent Daniel Kelly who denounced her for beating him instead of conceding.
Protasiewicz’s election creates a new progressive court majority on the high court for the first time in 15 years at just the right time. Two of the most important cases coming before the court will be protecting abortion rights and abolishing some of the most corrupt political gerrymandering in the country.
You rarely heard Michael Gableman’s name in the election, but you should have. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court elections have always been nonpartisan-in-name-only. The extreme rightwing Republican control of the court Protasiewicz’s election finally brought to an end began in 2008 with Gableman’s election. Gableman ran openly racist attack ads to defeat the court’s only African American Justice Louis Butler and went on to become one of the most corrupt justices in state history.
Gableman’s post-court career was equally shameful. Republican state senate election deniers hired Gableman in 2020 to find some excuse to overturn President Biden’s Wisconsin victory. Gableman’s phony investigation cost taxpayers millions of dollars without producing any credible evidence of vote fraud since it didn’t exist, but Gableman recommended throwing out the election results anyway to declare Trump the winner. That would have been unconstitutional.
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Stop the Gerrymandering
Voters all knew this year where both Protasiewiscz and Kelly stood on abortion rights, fair elections and the state’s dishonest political gerrymandering approved by the previous court. The absurdly Republican voting maps produce two-thirds Republican majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation even though Wisconsin is a closely divided battleground state.
Voters knew Protasiewicz’s views because she told them she personally supported women’s reproductive rights and opposed Republican gerrymandering that makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to achieve fair representation in the legislature. “Let’s be clear here: the maps are rigged, absolutely, positively rigged,” Protasiewicz said. “They do not reflect the people of the state.”
Kelly wasn’t nearly so honest with voters. Like Trump’s dishonest, democracy-destroying court appointees, Kelly pretended he didn’t have any personal opinions about issues coming before the court.
But voters already knew how extreme Kelly’s rightwing political views were. They removed Kelly from the court in 2020 after Gov. Scott Walker appointed him to fill a four-year vacancy. Justice Jill Karofsky beat Kelly the first time by the same 11-point margin. Two years earlier, the vacancy created when the unpopular Gableman decided not to run for reelection was filled by progressive Justice Rebecca Dallet by 12 points.
Upholding the Rule of Law
Those two elections set up Protasiewicz to flip the high court from extreme rightwing control to a new progressive majority restoring the rule of law and protection for constitutional rights. At Protasiewicz’s victory party, the other members of the majority Dallet, Karofsky and Ann Walsh Bradley marched into the celebration arm-in-arm to the playing of Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.”
Bradley is expected to become chief justice of the new court. She already plans to seek a fourth term in 2025, which will be the next court election. There could be dramatic changes ahead without a rightwing Supreme Court automatically siding with Republican legislators’ attempts to strip Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of power and sabotage voting rights going into the 2024 election.
What most Americans viewed as a truly terrible U.S. Supreme Court decision destroying the fundamental freedom of women and their families to control their own lives has created a new grassroots civil rights movement turning out voters in every election to restore our American democracy.
Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin who organized the nationwide funding and focus on the Protasiewicz race said Republicans, who say they’re against being “woke,” still haven’t awakened to what’s going on in this country.
“I think the moment when Republicans in the presidential primary debate are asked whether they’ll support a national abortion ban and they raise their hands is the moment that they will lose the next presidential election,” Wikler said.
Believe it or not, most Americans like the beautiful idea of a democracy in which everyone, male or female, Black, brown or white, straight or LGBTQ, have equal rights. We’ve just never figured out yet how to actually achieve it.
But whenever corrupt politicians try to destroy that American ideal, political activists start fighting back again to keep the dream alive.
