“The push, just five weeks after Justice Janet Protasiewicz joined the court and before she has heard a single case, serves as a last-ditch effort to stop the new 4-to-3 liberal majority from throwing out Republican-drawn state legislative maps and legalizing abortion in Wisconsin.” “Republicans in Wisconsin are coalescing around the prospect of impeaching a newly seated liberal justice on the state’s Supreme Court,” my newsroom colleague Reid J. But they can remove her, which is what they intend to do. Wisconsin Republicans can’t strip a judicial officer of her power. Wisconsin voters wanted her on the court to stand up for their reproductive and voting rights.
Protasiewicz won a double-digit victory, with record turnout. If elected, she said, she would defend abortion rights and give a new look at the state’s legislative maps, which she criticized as “rigged” and “unfair.”
And Protasiewicz made no secret of her views. If she won, Protasiewicz would break the conservative majority on the court, giving liberal justices an opportunity to shape the state’s legal landscape until at least the next judicial election cycle.
The reason behind the flood of money and attention was straightforward. Almost immediately, Wisconsin Republicans introduced legislation to weaken the state’s executive branch, curbing the authority that Walker had exercised as governor.Įarlier this year, Wisconsin voters took another step toward ending a decade of Republican minority rule in the Legislature by electing Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee county judge, to the State Supreme Court, in one of the most high-profile and expensive judicial elections in American history. In 2018, for example, Wisconsin voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, in the governor’s mansion, sweeping the incumbent, Scott Walker, out of office. Using their gerrymandered majority, Wisconsin Republicans have done everything in their power to undermine, subvert or even nullify the public’s attempt to chart a course away from the Republican Party. What makes the situation worse are the actions of Republican lawmakers. If a majority of the people cannot, under any realistic circumstances, elect a legislative majority of their choosing, then it’s hard to say whether they actually govern themselves. The gerrymandering alone undermines Wisconsin’s status as a democracy. No matter how much Wisconsin voters might want to elect a Democratic Legislature, the Republican gerrymander won’t allow them to. In 2018, this gerrymander proved strong enough to allow Wisconsin Republicans to win a supermajority of seats in the Assembly despite losing the vote for every statewide office and the statewide legislative vote by 8 percentage points, 54 to 46. And in 2016, Republicans and Democrats essentially split the statewide vote, but Republicans claimed 64 percent of the seats in the Assembly. In 2014, Republicans won the governorship with 52 percent of the vote, which gave them 63 percent of the seats in the Assembly. In 2012, the first year the maps were in effect, Republicans won 46 percent of the statewide vote but 60 percent of the seats in the State Assembly. For more than a decade, dating back to the Republican triumph in the 2010 midterm elections, Wisconsin Republicans have held their State Legislature in an iron lock, forged by a gerrymander so stark that nothing short of a supermajority of the voting public could break it.
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