What she said.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The conservative chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court accused her liberal colleagues of a “raw exercise of overreaching power” after they flexed their new majority Wednesday and fired the director of the state’s court system.

 

The four liberal justices, on just their second day as a majority on the court after 15 years under conservative control, voted to fire Randy Koschnick. Koschnick held the job for six years after serving for 18 years as a judge and running unsuccessfully as a conservative in 2009 against then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, a liberal.

 

“To say that I am disappointed in my colleagues is an understatement,” Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, now a member of the three-justice conservative minority, said in a lengthy statement after Koschnick was fired.

 

Ziegler said the move undermined her authority as chief justice. She called it unauthorized, procedurally and legally flawed, and reckless. But she said she would not attempt to stop it out of fear that other court employees could be similarly fired.

“My colleagues’ unprecedented dangerous conduct is the raw exercise of overreaching power,” she said. “It is shameful. I fear this is only the beginning.”

 

Fellow conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley blasted the move in a social media post, saying, “Political purges of court employees are beyond the pale.”

Knowing that they stand little chance of getting control of the legislature, Wisconsin’s liberals are looking to use the Supreme Court as an activist branch to enact their agenda. The November election is important. The April election may be more important.

Wisconsin Democrats are already envisioning, if they win the election in April and take a 4-3 majority, a political transformation of the state.

 

“In terms of the ability to change Wisconsin in two years, this could be an utterly different state,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Madison. “That is our real opportunity to not just stop the bad stuff from happening, but actually restore real democracy and accountability to Wisconsin, things like abortion rights and fair elections where your candidate might actually win.”

This is the correct ruling. The law is clear. It’s a shame that it wasn’t unanimous. It is also a shame that the court took so dang long to rule. The people deserve a court that acts with some urgency when the ruling will impact ongoing elections.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s conservative-controlled Supreme Court ruled Friday that absentee ballot drop boxes may be placed only in election offices and that no one other than the voter can return a ballot in person, dealing a defeat to Democrats who said the decision would make it harder to vote in the battleground state.

 

However, the court didn’t address whether anyone other than the voter can return his or her own ballot by mail. That means that anyone could still collect multiple ballots for voters and, instead of using a drop box, put them in the mail.

 

Republicans have argued that practice, known as ballot harvesting, is rife with fraud although there has been no evidence of that happening in Wisconsin. Democrats and others argue that many voters, particularly the elderly and disabled, have difficulty returning their ballots without the assistance of others.

 

Supporters argue drop boxes are a better option than mailing ballots because they go directly to the clerks and can’t be lost or delayed in transit.

The news story explains the issue poorly. The case wasn’t about whether drop boxes are a good idea or not. The case was about whether the law allows for drop boxes even though state elections officials allowed them. The law does not allow drop boxes. It’s a clear legal determination.

Furthermore, the news story fails to mention that Wisconsin did not use drop boxes at all until the pandemic. Their absence will not make it “harder to vote” in Wisconsin. It may make it harder to cheat, but it will exactly as easy or difficult to vote as it was before drop boxes began illegally appearing all over the state. If the state wants to have drop boxes in the future, it is a matter for the duly elected leaders of the state to pass a law saying so.

They sure took the long road to get there, but they got to the correct destination.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted Evers’ map on March 3, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it on March 23. The high court ruled that Evers’ map failed to consider whether a “race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”

 

Evers told the state Supreme Court it could still adopt his map with some additional analysis, or an alternative with six majority-Black districts. The Republican-controlled Legislature argued that its map should be implemented.

 

The Wisconsin court, controlled 4-3 by conservatives, sided with the Legislature.

 

“The maps proposed by the Governor … are racially motivated and, under the Equal Protection Clause, they fail strict scrutiny,” Chief Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Patience Roggensack, Rebecca Grassl Bradley and Brian Hagedorn.

 

The Legislature’s maps, they wrote, “are race neutral” and “comply with the Equal Protection Clause, along with all other application federal and state legal requirements.”

It’s safe to say that Wisconsin’s Supreme Court no longer has a conservative majority. It’s just the Hagedorn Court and his reasoning is so haphazard that the court’s ruling are just the luck of the draw. It all depends on how Hagedorn was feeling that day.

The state Supreme Court today delivered a win for Dems in picking Gov. Tony Evers’ congressional and legislative boundaries.

 

Even so, the new lines — if they withstand an appeal — would still leave Dems fighting an uphill battle to take the majority in the Assembly or Senate.

 

Writing for a 4-3 majority, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote Evers’ maps most closely followed the court’s November directive to take a “least-change” approach to the existing lines Republicans drew a decade ago.

 

[…]

 

Ziegler, the court’s chief justice, slammed the majority ruling as “a complete lack of regard for the Wisconsin Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause,” adding it “amounts to nothing more than an imposition of judicial will.”

 

Roggensack wrote that by adopting Evers’ map, the court’s majority had engaged in racial gerrymandering and hoped the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to “review Wisconsin’s unwarranted racial gerrymander, which clearly does not survive strict scrutiny.”

Good.

MADISON, Wis. — A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday denied a request from the state elections commission to keep absentee ballot drop boxes in place through the April 5 election for local offices.

 

That means that after Tuesday’s primary, drop boxes located outside of local election clerks’ offices will be illegal and no one other than the voter will be allowed to return an absentee ballot.

Remember that this is not about whether drop boxes are good or not. They may be in certain cases. This is about whether election officials can make up the rules for themselves instead of following the laws passed by the legislature. If the liberals want drop boxes, I suggest that they propose a bill so we can have a proper public debate.

Good news.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with Republicans in a redistricting case that lays the groundwork for the state’s current political boundaries to remain largely intact for the next decade.

 

In a 4-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority said it would take a “least changes” approach to Wisconsin’s current legislative and congressional maps, effectively limiting any changes in political boundaries to population changes.

 

The ruling means that the court will make as few changes as possible to political maps drawn and adopted in 2011.

 

[…]

 

In their ruling on Tuesday, however, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority argued that the state’s existing congressional maps had already passed muster, leaving no reason for the court to take more drastic action.

 

“The existing maps were adopted by the legislature, signed by the governor, and survived judicial review by the federal courts,” the ruling reads. “Treading further than necessary to remedy their current legal deficiencies…would intrude upon the constitutional prerogatives of the political branches and unsettle the constitutional allocation of power.”

It’s hard to argue with that logic.

Excellent.

This election is going to be a complete mess.

MADISON – The state Supreme Court told election officials Thursday that absentee ballots should not be mailed for now so the justices can determine whether they should include the Green Party’s presidential ticket.

The 4-3 order left open the possibility of reprinting 2.3 million ballots and delaying the printing of others — moves that election officials said would cause them to miss deadlines set by state law.

The order fell along ideological lines, with the conservatives in the majority and the liberals in dissent.

In response to the order, the state Elections Commission submitted a report late Thursday that suggested as many as 378,000 ballots have already been sent to voters. But the head of the commission said there was no way to know for certain how many ballots have been sent because that duty falls to municipal clerks, not the commission.

Adding candidates to the ballots after some have been sent would be complicated. Voters who have already been sent a ballot would need to get a second one and clerks would have to make sure no one voted twice.

[…]

The Green Party case centers on whether presidential nominee Howie Hawkins and vice presidential nominee Angela Walker should be on the ballot.

The Elections Commission didn’t include the Green Party on the ballot after it deadlocked last month on the issue. Walker, a Milwaukee native, provided two different addresses on her campaign filings, and the three Democrats on the commission said that should keep the Green Party off the ballot. The commission’s three Republicans wanted the Green Party on the ballot.

Unspoken at last month’s commission meeting was how the Green Party could affect the presidential election. Democrats fear the liberal party could take votes away from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republicans hope such a situation will help GOP President Donald Trump.