The issue, as you may have guessed, is legislative districting, which strongly favors Republicans, and the current threat to impeach the new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Janet Protasiewicz, who got elected after declaring that the districting in Wisconsin is "rigged."
Bouie writes:
Wisconsin Republicans might, for the first time, show an ounce of restraint and refrain from taking this radical step against self-government. If they choose otherwise, Justice Protasiewicz could sue, citing her First Amendment right to free speech: the Republican case against her, after all, is that she disparaged their gerrymander in her campaign, making her “biased.”...
I'll show an ounce of restraint and refrain from opining on that First Amendment right. But I think impeaching a judge for talking too specifically about an issue that could arise in a forthcoming case is a crazy thing to do. Look a few steps down that road.
And in this case in particular, it makes the Wisconsin Republican legislators look like they're pathetically dependent on gerrymandering.
Bouie goes on to bemoan the failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to abandon its longstanding restraint and use constitutional law to intervene in political gerrymandering. I'm not blogging about that this morning. It's an old question, already blogged many times on this blog, e.g., here.
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47 comments:
Bouie used to be a man of the Left who occasionally had interesting insights. Trump broke him.
Democracy in Danger = Republicans threatening Democrat's hold on power
Republicans in California, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Washington state could not be reached for comment.
Because there are none. But...carry on.
Justice P prejudged the case. Recuse or impeach!
But I think impeaching a judge for talking too specifically about an issue that could arise in a forthcoming case is a crazy thing to do. Look a few steps down that road.
Before we crossed that line in the road many miles back, way, way back behind us beyond the horizon...back there this asymmetric advice made some sense. Now that we've crossed the line and taken 'a few steps down that road' the only appropriate thing to do is to fulfill the consequences of stepping over said line.
We can discuss a new agreement at the truce talks/prisoner swap. Calls for civility here now are bullshit...
“And in this case in particular, it makes the Wisconsin Republican legislators look like they're pathetically dependent on gerrymandering.”
They are as evidenced by their threat to impeach Justice Protaciewicz before she even hears a case. The majorities in the State House and Senate could vanish if Democrat votes would be fairly counted. Wisconsin could go the way of Michigan with majority House, Senate and Governorship and it can’t come soon enough. Republicans do have much to fear, the backlash will happen. Protaciewicz won by 11 points, the people of Wisconsin spoke and Republicans are trying to disenfranchise them. It will not sit well with Wisconsinites.
Hmmm...popular election of state supreme court justice...elicits a candidate who runs on a preconceived position...who gets elected...and then openly politicizes the state supreme court. Anybody see a problem with that? Anybody see a problem with the U.S. Supreme Court now operating in the same manner except for the popular election part?
Rigged: What she plans to do to elections.
Bouie goes on to bemoan the failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to abandon its longstanding restraint and use constitutional law to intervene in political gerrymandering.
Sounds like she’s calling on the Supreme Court to find her some additional votes.
can judge still sit on case in future?
I assume there was no mention of the busloads of Chicago thugs during Walker wars.
No need to look down the road. We have Democrats that impeached a President twice because politically they could. Now they are using criminal prosecution of his speech to prevent him from running again for President, because he is leading in the polls. It makes Democrats look pathetically like they are dependent on courts to overrule the will of the voters. Here, it is a democratically elected legislature going after a democratically elected member of a court. We are boiling down our democracy to the smallest fragments to determine our governance and still calling it "democracy". Better if more courts showed restraints.
“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. In 2014, Republicans won the governorship with 52 percent of the vote, which gave them 63 percent of the seats in the Assembly. And in 2016, Republicans and Democrats essentially split the statewide vote, but Republicans claimed 64 percent of the seats in the Assembly.
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. No matter how much Wisconsin voters might want to elect a Democratic Legislature, the Republican gerrymander won’t allow them to.
The gerrymandering alone undermines Wisconsin’s status as a democracy. 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.”
From the linked opinion piece.
Democratic gerrymandering through lawfare.
Justice Protasiewicz could sue, citing her First Amendment right to free speech
A lefty advocating for free speech in the 21st century? Amazing! Oh, she just means free speech for her.
Never mind. Carry on.
Inga said…"The majorities in the State House and Senate could vanish if Democrat votes would be fairly counted."
I'm still waiting for evidence that Wisconsin has unfair districting. This is that bullshit "wasted votes" theory, isn't it?
it makes the Wisconsin Republican legislators look like they're pathetically dependent on gerrymandering.
No it doesn't. The WI GOP dominates the legislature because of the rural and cultural demographics of the state. Crazy Liberals, Leftists and Democrats are concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee. The rest of us really want these two areas to leave the rest of us alone.
Instead, Madison sucks up the tax and student loan money, and Milwaukee distributes crime, crack, heroine, and fentanyl.
What the new female liberal court is trying to do is draw out Robin Vos seat. Also, they will probably draw new gerrymandered maps where you grab a consternated corner of Madison or Milwaukee and create a whale penis district that stretches into a rural red area.
It all bullshit. If we are at the point where the court overrides the legislature and can draw maps, write laws etc....it's over.
Let's quit pretending liberals and leftists are "protecting democracy". They hate and despise people who don't agree with them. So...they will engage in voter fraud, lawfare, and corrupt courts to get their way. Corrupt unethical judges like Janet are a key to the strategy.
Gerrymandering is what you say when the other side draws the lines.
It's the G-word of politics.
Yawn.
-XC
Can I predict that the Times article is silent on the gerrymandering that occurs one state to the south of Wisconsin?
I do think there are parallels between Justice Protasawiez (spelled without looking, be kind) words re: gerrymandering and Trump's comments re: the 2020 election, and the difference in reaction to them on different sides of the aisle tells me something.
Wisconsin Supreme: no hearing needed,we know what to do.
Illinois Supreme: finest state Supreme Court that money can buy.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/article_a2c00992-bd36-11ed-b4f1-8fb9779f6a34.html
Pritzker, defendant in gun challenge, gave $2 million to two supreme court justices
@Inga 10:47am - That's what I thought. No whale penis districts (H.T. Gusty Winds). "Wasted votes" theory. It is outrageous that either party (in this case the democrats) thinks they are entitled to half the votes.
Gerrymandering
thats why Kinzinger cries
Janet Protasiewicz, who got elected after declaring that the districting in Wisconsin is "rigged."
The districting is "rigged" in every state. When the Democrats control the legislature, they draw the districts in a way that benefits the Democrats. When the Republicans control the legislature, they draw the districts in a way that benefits the Republicans. That's the way politics works today.
Opinions on gerrymandering are truly non partisan. Both sides equally agree that when the other side does it a true threat to democracy.
The "gerrymander" determines the size of the Republican majority in the legislature, not it's likelihood.
The extreme concentration of Democrat votes in Milwaukee and Madison makes this unavoidable and can only be overcome by an even more extreme gerrymander in the opposite direction.
Here's a less biased look.
The majorities in the State House and Senate could vanish if Democrat votes would be fairly counted.
The idea that Democrats would never lose an election if only the votes were "fairly" counted, is part and parcel of Democrat lore.
Fairly, of course, takes on any number of necessary meanings.
'Projection' isn't just a river in Egypt.
Or something like that.
WAR. R's should do it. Why not? F the corrupt left.
Gusty said...
"It all bullshit. If we are at the point where the court overrides the legislature and can draw maps, write laws etc....it's over."
100%
Impeach her. Now.
I think I pointed out before that Wisconsin is more than Milwaukee and Madison.
The dullard posts vote percentages as if they represented the votes in those particular districts. This is the same phenomenon that we see in the Electoral College. Representatives are elected by voters in their districts. If everyone was elected by statewide votes, the two blue cities would dominate and leave everyone of those districts at the Democrats' mercy. This exactly why Democrats want to elect the president by popular vote. The shit hole cities would determine the result. In 2016, if you subtracted the California votes, Trump won the popular vote. We all know what happened in 2020 even if some don't admit it.
Look, WI is a very difficult state to district. Madison and Milwaukee are where the Dem votes are, but that's the trouble: You have two very, very Democratic locales, and the rest of the state that's mildly Republican. How then do you make "compact and contiguous" districts that properly reflect the population? You can't. You are stuck. Because Madison and Milwaukee are very, vert Democratic, and everywhere else is mildly Republican.
Add in the SCOTUS's "majority-minority" business, and it only gets worse.
The only way I see out of this is to get a lot of Dem voters to leave Madison and Milwaukee for pastures greener.
Look, the difficulty is what do you do when a couple of counties in your state are really, really Democratic, and the rest are mildly Republican? And the short answer is "there's nothing you can do," b/c whatever else happens, your state is still divided into districts, and if a few of them are 90% Democratic and the remainder 52% Republican, you end up with a Republican legislature.
You wanna get rid of that? You might start encouraging Madisonians and Milwaukeeans to relocate.
Meanwhile Wisconsin has opened a can of worms by having a disbarment trial of one of Trump's lawyers, and he gets to provide evidence:
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, testifying in the disbarment trial of Trump's attorney John Eastman, just said Wisconsin Speaker of the House Robin Vos fired him him and the others helping him with the 2020 election investigation because it was "politically inconvenient."
Check out the thread, and the trial. There is beaucoup evidence of a rigged election, criminal vote harvesting from nursing homes while intentionally ignoring and blocking safeguards, etc, in Wisconsin. Facebook employees had read/write access to voter rolls, and Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions in illegal contributions to Democratic GOTV efforts. That's just one state. 70,000 votes nationwide separated Biden from Trump.
https://twitter.com/Rach_IC/status/1700208794213691866
In the PA Supreme Court, one of the "Just Us"es has a brother who is a mobster with a record of ballot stuffing, and this guy, plus several other judges who are known by the DoJ to have been elected by ballot stuffing, but the DoJ won't tell us which ones, make rulings on whether, for example, Republicans should be allowed election observers in certain precincts in Philly.
This fight is worth having, we can give up, and go with Nikki the Neocon, and the Uniparty, or we can fight, and maybe lose, but this is a hill worth dying on. Giving up and losing are the same thing.
Look a few steps down that road.
They never do, because they assume either (a) they'll be in power forever, or (b) the other side is too wimpy to do the same to them.
Laboratories of Autocracy? Now do Minnesota, next door, with vanishingly thin legislative branch majorities (Democrat) but yet have rammed through a panoply of far-left laws/policies this year in coordination with their highly partisan Democrat governor.
Why are Republicans in Wisconsin so scared of majority rule? Tough question.
In recent years, we Wisconsinites have witnessed the recalls, John Does, and state Capital insurrections of the left. Seems like they gave up any notion of “norms” long ago. Time for these folks to reap what they’ve sowed.
Blogger jim5301 said...
Why are Republicans in Wisconsin so scared of majority rule? Tough question.
Dumb question, as usual. They would like to avoid rule by mobs in Milwaukee and loony leftists in Madison. Nothing to do with a majority except in those two Democrat shit holes.
Why are Republicans in Wisconsin so scared of majority rule? Tough question.
The founders of this once-great nation were scared enough of majority rule that they implemented a Constitution with a Bill of Rights to circumscribe the power of the majority. If you really really want majority rule, bear in mind that the country is still majority white, highly majority heterosexual, virtually entirely non-trans, etc. You might not like a "majority rules" kind of place.
Recent, Bushman?
A decade plus for most of what you talk of.
Like Dr Dementia K, you seem to believe not having a clue makes you an expert.
Courts have been biased and judges self serving for as long as the US has been around. Abe Lincoln told the story of the Judge who fined a defendant 10 dollars for contempt of court in claiming that the Judges brother stole a pig that had the defendants brand on it. He gave the Judge a $20 gold eagle. The Judge said he had no change. The defendant said, that's ok I'll just take it out in contempt.
Stop the pretense, Judges are political agents serving their own interests. When we get over the fantasy that Judges are pristine disciples both parties can just act in their best interests. There is no Judge that is looking out for you in general, although that sometimes happens, if the Judge has nothing to gain by cheating you.
Having been on several Federal and State juries, I really thing that most Judges are fair, but political Judges are common, like this SC one. Impeachment is as political an act as pre-judging a case. But the legislature must be sure they won't face a backlash in their own districts. A backlash in Madison and Milwaukee won't matter.
tim in vermont said...
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, testifying in the disbarment trial of Trump's attorney John Eastman, just said Wisconsin Speaker of the House Robin Vos fired him him and the others helping him with the 2020 election investigation because it was "politically inconvenient."
Michael Gableman????
Blogger tim in vermont said...
" Meanwhile Wisconsin has opened a can of worms by having a disbarment trial of one of Trump's lawyers, and he gets to provide evidence"
Oh brother- the disbarment proceeding is in California and has nothing to do with Wisconsin other than Gableman's moronic testimony.
For his final witnesses Eastman plans on calling The Pillow Guy, Kari Lake, and Yukko the Clown.
And in this case in particular, it makes the Wisconsin Republican legislators look like they're pathetically dependent on gerrymandering.
I think it makes them look like they're dependent on an absence of democrat gerrymandering
MDT,
Relocation is certainly not the only way. Another alternative is for the Wisconsin Democrats to consider the makeup of the state, and moderate some of its positions so as to attract more voters.
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