While Democrats routinely accuse election integrity advocates of disenfranchising voters, leftist lawfare practitioners in the battleground Badger State could disenfranchise more than a million voters, according to State Senator Duey Stroebel (pictured above).
The Saukville Republican called it a “preposterous attack on democracy.”
Attorneys for Law Forward, a Madison-based coalition of left-leaning law firms and advocacy groups, have sued to overturn Wisconsin’s legislative maps. The state redistricting plan, passed by the Republican-led Legislature, has survived Democratic Party challenges of “extreme gerrymandering.”
But on August 1, the Wisconsin Supreme Court turned from a conservative to a liberal majority after far-left Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative former Justice Dan Kelly in last spring’s election. For the first time in 15 years, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is controlled by liberals, 4-3.
One day later, Law Forward filed a redistricting lawsuit with the newly minted liberal-led court.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the state Assembly and Senate maps unconstitutional and, ultimately, order 17 State Senate elections in 2022 null and void, forcing a re-vote in 2024.
“If we are trying to get fair maps for the 2024 election, all of the Assembly districts are already up, and half of the Senate districts will be up for election in 2024…,” Jeffery Mandell, co-founder and president of Law Forward, told reporters during a virtual briefing last month.
The same well-heeled coalition of attorneys is leading a legal effort in the Left’s bid to silence any attempt by conservatives to impeach Protasiewicz if she does not recuse herself from the redistricting lawsuit. While campaigning for the Supreme Court seat, Protasiewicz made bias-exposing comments, declaring that the current maps are “rigged.” Her campaign also took $10 million from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in what proved to be the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.
“They do not reflect people in this state. I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair,” Protasiewicz said of the legislative maps at a forum in January. “I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”
On the fairness question, the U.S. Supreme Court last year declared unconstitutional a redistricting plan produced behind closed doors by liberal Governor Tony Evers. The high court found that Evers’ self-proclaimed “fair” maps contained racial gerrymandering.
Republicans challenged the liberal governor’s maps after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of them, claiming the plan most followed the court’s “least change” requirement.
Evers’ plan created an illegal seventh black-majority district, opposed by some black representatives of Milwaukee.
“[W]e have held that if race is the predominant factor motivating the placement of voters in or out of a particular district, the State bears the burden of showing that the design of that district withstands strict scrutiny,” the U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion declared. The plan, suffice to say, did not withstand strict scrutiny.
Now, Stroebel said, Democrats and their left-wing activist allies are hoping to overturn the 2022 election that gave Republicans a supermajority in the Senate and disenfranchise more than 1 million votes cast.
“Ultimately, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, after input from the Supreme Court of the United States, affirmed the validity of Wisconsin’s legislative maps. The redistricting lawsuit presents almost no new arguments. This lawsuit is simply a ploy by the left to upend the democratic process,” the senator said.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Senator Duey Stroebel” by Senator Duey Stroebel. Background Photo “Voting Booths” by Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
