Democracy in Wisconsin continues to be held hostage by a GOP-controlled legislature that is losing popular support and is willing to do almost anything to cling to the power it secured by creating some of the most grossly distorted voting maps in the country.
Terrified that the new liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court will strike down the Republican-drawn maps and end the party's political stranglehold on Wisconsin, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has threatened to impeach newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz in order to prevent her from hearing a case challenging the extremely partisan maps Vos helped create.
Last spring Wisconsin voters gave Protasiewicz a decisive victory over former Justice Dan Kelly, a GOP consultant and anti-abortion extremist, in a $51-million race that shattered all previous records for spending, more than half of which was by outside groups.
Protasiewicz's election means that Vos and his manufactured majority in the statehouse could finally face a fair hearing from a court that until August had been held captive by the GOP—and its dark money operatives—since 2008.
The GOP's pretense for getting rid of Protasiewicz is that during her campaign she called the maps that propelled Vos to his speakership "rigged." But this month Wisconsin's Judicial Commission cleared the new justice of any wrongdoing in her campaign comments, and nothing in the court's rules requires her to recuse herself from challenges to those gerrymandered maps.
And Protasiewicz is absolutely right about the rigging. Thanks to the GOP's successful dark money "REDMAP" operation in 2010, Wisconsin dropped from one of the most democratic states in the U.S. to the bottom four. According to a 2020 report by the Electoral Integrity Project, Wisconsin's political maps scored 23 out of 100, the worst in the nation and on par with Congo-Kinshasa, home to one of Africa's most troubled regimes.
The 2018 Wisconsin elections offer a case in point. Democrats won all five statewide races and more than half (54 percent) of the vote for legislative races, yet the state's gerrymandered maps gave Republicans a two-thirds supermajority control over the Assembly and 58 percent of state Senate seats. Under the current maps, it would take a 12 percent Democratic landslide for the Democratic Party to win a bare majority in the legislature, according to experts.
REDMAP architect and longtime Republican political consultant Karl Rove said it best back in 2010: "He who controls the pen draws the line, and he who draws the line decides the outcome of most contests."
The willingness of Republican state representatives to use their illegitimate "majority" to take the nuclear option of threatening to impeach Protasiewicz and cancel the voice of more than one million Wisconsin voters shows their desperation—and lacks any legal basis.
In 2002—ironically in a case brought by the Republican Party in Minnesota—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judicial candidates have a First Amendment right to express their views on disputed legal and political issues. And almost every recent Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin has openly campaigned on issues of relevance to voters.
If Vos proceeds with his plan, Protasiewicz would be the first justice in Wisconsin to face impeachment over speaking out about important issues.
The speaker's second supposed ground for impeaching Protasiewicz is equally baseless. He and the GOP argue that the nearly $10 million her campaign received from the Democratic Party—after Republicans killed public financing of state judicial elections—means that she cannot rule impartially on any challenge to the Republican-drawn maps.
Unfortunately for Vos, the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court adopted a rule in 2010—at the request of and drafted by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC)—stipulating that campaign contributions and independent expenditures are not grounds for recusal. WMC went on to become a leading dark money backer of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and several right-wing justices.
The GOP's hypocrisy on this point is particularly pronounced. In 2017, when 54 retired judges asked the Supreme Court to reverse its 2010 rule and recuse themselves in cases where their donors were litigants, then Justice Rebecca Bradley—who has joined Vos in calling for Protasiewicz's impeachment—said, "Every judge and justice in Wisconsin should be highly offended by this petition because it attacks their integrity."
Backed into a corner, Vos has resorted to other tactics to protect the GOP's rigged maps from the new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court. He has appointed a secret star chamber of three former Supreme Court justices to advise him on ways to remove Protasiewicz. And last week Assembly Republicans rammed through a bill to create an Iowa-style independent redistricting commission—which it has steadfastly opposed in the past—but not before changing the rules to give the GOP majority in the legislature the final say.
If impeachment does move forward in the Assembly, some observers have suggested that the Senate may delay a vote and keep the court deadlocked, or work to convict Protasiewicz by Dec. 1 so that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would be forced to name a replacement who would face an election on the day of the Republican presidential primary next April. It's just another tactic to game the system to hold on to power.
Clearly, the one thing Wisconsin GOP leaders fear most is facing voters on a fair playing field.
Evan Vorpahl is a senior researcher at the watchdog group True North Research, and Arn Pearson is an attorney and executive director of the Center of Media and Democracy, a nonpartisan investigative journalism group based in Wisconsin.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
