DL Open Thread: Sunday, August 13, 2023
Wisconsin Rethugs Threaten To Impeach Justice Who Could Overturn Blatant Gerrymandering. Election nullification MAGAt-style:
But when liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz trounced her conservative opponent in the state Supreme Court election in April, it was a big win—not just for those who care about reestablishing their reproductive rights, but for anyone who genuinely cares about representative democracy.
In other words, fair legislative maps looked achievable for the first time in more than a decade. Which meant it was now past time for the GOP to squeal.
On Friday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hinted that impeachment could be on the table if Protasiewicz votes to disrupt the GOP’s plans for a permanent white minority rule over our country—or, worse, if Sen. Ron Johnson is ever forced to fill out his ballot next to a Black person. Why? Because she will have “prejudged” the case.
An article from The Atlantic describes how Rethugs have kept Democrats as permanent minorities in a state that is as close to 50-50 as any state in the country:
Wisconsin is a famously closely divided state, but thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not. With that kind of job security, Republicans in Wisconsin could enact an agenda far to the right of the state’s actual electorate, attacking unions, abortion rights, and voting rights without having to worry that swing voters would throw the bums out. After all, they couldn’t. And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.
To pursue the ‘logic’ of Speaker Vos to its, yes, extremes, all those RWNJ judges hadn’t ‘pre-judged’ the gerrymander, they merely deep-sixed democracy on jurisprudential grounds. Long-term: Rethugs are turning Wisconsin blue. People don’t like anti-democratic moves. See Ohio.
Judge Cannon Follows In Clarence Thomas’ Footsteps? She’s already been gifted a luxury trip paid for by… Leonard Leo:
With Cannon’s profile higher than ever, her impartiality is being questioned. The judge’s financial disclosure form for 2021, which was reviewed by Accountable.US, a liberal-leaning watchdog group that tracks government corruption, shows that she was reimbursed by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School for a six day trip to “colloquium seminar” held at a resort and spa in Montana in September.
The law school was renamed after Scalia, a conservative supreme court justice in 2016 – months after his death – “the result,” the New York Times reported, “of a $30 million gift brokered by Leonard Leo.” George Mason University intended the Antonin Scalia school to become “a Yale or Harvard of conservative legal scholarship and influence”, the Times wrote.
The purpose of Cannon’s 2021 trip, according to her financial disclosure form, was to attend the “Sage Lodge Colloquium”, an annual conference held by the law school in the town of Pray, Montana. Newsweek reported that Cannon attended the colloquium again in 2022.
