Meanwhile, as we slept, a political earthquake hit Wisconsin

Janet Protasiewicz, the avowedly liberal candidate for a 10-year term on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, won a landslide victory in her race against Daniel Kelly, a conservative former justice on the court.  Protasiewicz ran what some considered a risky and controversial campaign, making plain her positions on abortion and gerrymandering, the two biggest issues currently facing Wisconsin voters.  The seat on the Supreme Court is supposedly a non-partisan contest.  If you went hunting for a voter in Wisconsin yesterday who believed that fiction, you’d have come up empty.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been dominated by a 4-3 conservative majority, who while running stealth campaigns in previous elections, promptly began siding with conservative causes the minute they got on the bench.

Protasiewicz’s campaign for the Supreme Court pissed off Republicans because she made a calculation that by being upfront with Wisconsin’s voters about her stands on issues they cared about, she would be rewarded for her honesty.  Gerrymandering is one of those issues.  The Supreme Court, while dominated by the conservative majority, allowed district lines for both state and federal offices to be drawn in such a way that they have given Republicans a stranglehold on both houses of the state legislature and Congressional representation in Washington.  Wisconsin, a toss-up state in national and state-wide elections, has six Republican Congressmen to the Democrats’ two. 

Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, Tony Evers. In a state where registration by party is equal, at 42 percent for both Republicans and Democrats with 16 percent independents, Republicans dominate the state senate with a nearly 2 to 1 majority, 21 Republicans to the Democrats’ 11.  It’s the same in the state assembly where Republicans outnumber Democrats 64 to 35.  Something ain’t Kosher with Wisconsin’s district lines, folks. Jeffrey Mandell, president of Law Forward, a progressive law firm in Wisconsin, told the New York Times that he would file a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Supreme Court’s previous decision on redistricting on the day after Protasiewicz takes her seat on the court.  “Pretty much everything problematic in Wisconsin flows from the gerrymandering,” Mandell told the Times yesterday. “Trying to address the gerrymander and reverse the extreme partisan gerrymandering we have is the highest priority.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is also expected to hear a challenge to the state’s 174 year old law which bans nearly all abortions.  The law took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.  A challenge to the 1849 law has been working its way through state courts and is expected to reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court after Protasiewicz takes her seat on the court.  Which is why her campaign for the court was so important and so straightforward.  She made her position on abortion crystal clear during the campaign, earning her the landslide vote yesterday.

“Today’s results mean two very important and special things,” Protasiewicz told a crowd of supporters last night after the election was called. “First, it means that Wisconsin voters have made their voices heard. They have chosen to reject partisan extremism in this state. And second, it means our democracy will always prevail.”

Her opponent Kelly was not happy that he had lost his election to the bench by 11 points.  “I wish that I’d be able to concede to a worthy opponent, but I do not have a worthy opponent,” Kelly told his supporters last night.  “This was the most deceitful, dishonorable, despicable campaign I have ever seen run for the court.  I do not say this because of the rancid slanders that were launched against me, although that was bad enough.  My opponent is a serial liar.  She has disregarded judicial ethics.  She demeaned the judiciary with her behavior.  This is the future we have to look forward to in Wisconsin.”

Well, at least Kelly is right about that.  Republicans have used deceitful, dishonorable, and despicable political tactics to maintain what amounts to minority rule in that state for the last couple of decades, during which they nearly killed off public employee unions and imposed stiff  restrictions on voters and banned ballot drop-boxes in naked attempts to hang onto control.

On a national level through political lobbying organizations like the Federalist Society, Republicans have gained control over the Supreme Court, where they ended the constitutional right to abortion under Roe v. Wade and gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But when the other side uses politics to gain advantage through the judiciary, they call foul.

We used to have a political system in this country where elections were won or lost, and the losing candidate gracefully conceded his or her loss and moved on, running in the next election for the same office or switching offices to run for.  Now as a party, it seems, Republicans have refused to concede elections they don’t win, as if losing is somehow illegal in the authoritarian world they seek to impose on the country.

Well, in Wisconsin, at least, it’s a new day.  A Democratic candidate has won election by being straightforward with the voters about where she stands on the key issues of the day, abortion primary among them.  Here’s hoping the campaign run by Protasiewicz is a model for Democrats in other states and other races.