Why the Supreme Court Should Take On Political Corruption in Wisconsin

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News Desk
Why the Supreme Court Should Take On Political Corruption in Wisconsin

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-the-supreme-court-should-take-on-political-corruption-in-wisconsin



By Lincoln Caplan , September 23, 2016





A few months in to Scott Walker’s term as governor, his right-wing circle mobilized to raise corporate funding in support of a conservative justice on the State Supreme Court.
A few months in to Scott Walker’s term as governor, his right-wing circle mobilized to raise corporate funding in support of a conservative justice on the State Supreme Court. Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty

Next week, the Supreme Court is scheduled to consider whether it will hear an appeal of a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that, last year, halted a criminal investigation and ordered the destruction of all the evidence it gathered. The case is about the seemingly peripheral issue of judicial recusal. But it brings together two of the biggest disrupters of American democracy today: the surge, after the Citizens United decision struck down limits on independent spending, of private influence in elections; and the politicization of the highest courts in many states. For the past eight years, Wisconsin has been a laboratory testing the toxicity of this combination.

In 2008, conservative businesspeople in Wisconsin recruited a county trial judge named Michael Gableman to challenge Louis Butler, a liberal justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who was its first African-American member. In support of Gableman, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Wisconsin chapter of the Club for Growth, the conservative group funded by the Koch brothers’ network, spent an estimated $2.8 million. Gableman won with fifty-one per cent of the vote, giving the conservatives what turned out to be a critical majority on the court.

Gableman’s election raised an issue of serious concern around the country: When an organization, or an individual, that supported a judge’s election is a party to a case before him, shouldn’t that judge recuse himself? In 2009, by a 5–4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state judge must recuse himself when spending by a party to a case had “a significant and disproportionate influence” on the outcome of the judge’s election. The Court reasoned that, “just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when—without the consent of the other parties—a man chooses the judge in his own cause.”

Shortly after that decision, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Fund proposed a change in the recusal rules of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, so that a justice would have to recuse himself if a party in a case, or the lawyer or law firm handling it, had given a thousand dollars or more within the previous two years. In response, the Wisconsin Realtors Association and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce submitted two opposing rule petitions, which the justices voted to adopt, without amendment, in October, 2009. Together, the rule changes meant that a justice did not have to recuse himself just because a litigant had contributed to a justice’s campaign or made an independent expenditure on its behalf. The court’s four conservatives made up the majority that approved the changes........................




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[kimbutgar]

1. An organized crime group came in and took over Wisconsin disguised as a political party

I've always called them the Gangsters of politics and Wisconsin was their first complete takeover and the crime party is working to finish cementing other states. Kansas, Texas, Iowa, Michigan are almost locked up completely.

[dembotoz]

2. what is just and what is legal is not the same

i used to think they were the same but as i get older they seem further apart.

life is not like the tv shows where the bad guys get it in the end

sadly the state court reminds me of this way too often