A Huge Progressive Win in Wisconsin

Despite numerous electoral defeats in 2020, 2022, and other races where extreme MAGA candidates and/or darlings of the Christofascists have gone down to defeat, the Republican primary voter base continues to nominate ever more extreme candidates and those Republicans in office,  embrace ever more extreme positions. This despite the fact that poll after poll and survey after survey show that najorities of voters (at least outside of backwaters like southwest Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi to name a few) oppose the GOP war on abortion, gays, accurate history, and voting rights, Republican primary voters nominate candidates that not that many years ago would have been prevented from being on the ballot.  Driving to work Joe Scarborough, a former conservative Republican in Congress lamented that the GOP primary voters and their elected political whores seem unable to look beyond their right wing news bubble and grasp reality.  This propensity to nominate extremists received a sharp rebuke in Wisconsin in a state supreme court race where the progressive candidate annihilated the far right Republican candidate. The race results will have huge impacts on Wisconsin and is yet another message that Republicans around the country will likely ignore to their peril (and the benefit of the rest of us).  A column in the Washington Post looks at the progressive candidates huge victory:

In a state so evenly divided that a 1- or 2-point margin is a resounding victory, Wisconsin voters turned out in droves on Tuesday to deliver an unmistakable blow to right-wing judges and politicians pushing forced-birth laws, hyper-gerrymandering, voter suppression and union-busting. Progressive Judge Janet Protasiewicz clobbered former right-wing state Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly by 11 points. That gives liberal judges a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court, a dramatic shift for a court that in recent years had delivered one victory after another to right-wing politicians and activists.

The race turned primarily on two issues: An 1849 abortion ban triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade and a radical gerrymander plan. The latter, possibly the most extreme gerrymander in the country, turned a 50-50 state into a 6-to-2 Republican advantage in congressional seats. The state Supreme Court race, given the issues involved — the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization backlash and the fact the court could play a critical role in determining the certification of Wisconsin’s 2024 presidential electors — had broken all spending records for judicial races, with tens of millions raised and spent by the candidates and third-party groups.

Pundits who thought defeated former president Donald Trump’s indictment would set off some sort of backlash to Kelly’s benefit were engaged in wishful thinking. Wisconsin voters are savvy enough to understand the former president’s legal debacles have nothing whatsoever to do with their state courts.

Democratic state party chairman Ben Wikler, who mounted a mammoth turn-out-the-vote operation, told me Tuesday, “The GOP machine thought they had broken Wisconsin’s democracy enough that they could rip away fundamental rights from half the population and never suffer the consequences. Tonight, an enraged electorate proved them wrong. In the state that tips the country, Dobbs, the crowning achievement of the far right, became its undoing.”

“Republicans here warn that ‘the rule of law’ might be replaced by ‘the rule of Janet,’ and that if she wins, hyperpartisan court races will become the norm,” intoned Semafor’s David Weigel, as if the right’s evisceration of voting rights and reproductive freedom is the norm and exemplifies the rule of law.

Kelly paid lip service during the campaign to the “rule of law,” but he has left little doubt that he is a right-wing champion, not a neutral jurist. He provided legal advice to the state GOP on the phony elector scheme and worked for antiabortion activists. His application to former governor Scott Walker “included a writing sample that likened affirmative action to slavery,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported. No one could be confused about his ideological bent. . . .

Protasiewicz explained in a recent interview for Wisconsin Public Radio, “I tell you what my values are because I think that Supreme Court candidates should share with the community and the electorate what their values are.” However, she added: “Nonetheless, I will uphold the law [and] follow the Constitution when I make any decisions. Nothing is prejudged.”

Frankly, after years of right-wing judges dissembling about their respect for precedent and their supposed open-mindedness (despite public advocacy against abortion), there is something refreshing about progressive judges going to voters to set out their values.

The intellectual dishonesty we get from the Federalist Society’s embrace of cherry-picked originalism (that inevitably leads to results conservatives favor) and the glaring intellectual dishonesty in service of partisanship from the current U.S. Supreme Court have made clear that the “game” is to reason backward from results.

Perhaps it’s time to end the charade wherein right-wing judges pretend not to be right-wing (while their Senate allies bombard any Democratic president’s nominee with QAnon-based conspiracy theories and blatant distortions). Judges on the right have been roving through the judicial landscape to turn back the clock on 150 years of social progress. It’s time to recognize that our courts were long ago politicized.

If voters overwhelmingly elect judges such as Protasiewicz who clearly articulate their values while vowing to consider each case on its merits, then we are witnessing something far too rare: informed democracy. When everyone lays their cards on the table, it turns out that an honest appraisal of judicial philosophies overwhelmingly benefits Democrats.

“The results couldn’t be more clear: Reproductive freedom was the deciding factor in this election. Wisconsinites turned out because they understood that when abortion rights are under attack, the attacks won’t stop there.”

Elected judges around the country should perk up: If they want to hijack democracy by acting like MAGA legislators in robes, they’ll find themselves out of office. And the warning to Republicans could not be more blunt: If you keep pushing right-wing judges widely out of step with the 21st-century United States to trample on cherished civil rights, voters will boot you out, up and down the ballot.

Republicans have every right to panic that Dobbs might usher in a new era of Democratic dominance in critical swing states.