Tag: wisconsin supreme court
Former Wisconsin Judge Suspended From Bar For Pushing 2020 Conspiracies

Former Wisconsin Judge Suspended From Bar For Pushing 2020 Conspiracies

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a widely derided review of the 2020 presidential election, searching for evidence for baseless accusations of fraud, will have his law license suspended for three years, according to a stipulated agreement between him and the state Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR).

Law Forward, the progressive voting rights focused firm, filed a grievance against Gableman with the OLR in 2023. The OLR filed a complaint against Gableman in November that alleged, among other counts, that he had failed to “provide competent representation” and to “abstain from all offensive personality” and of violating attorney-client privilege.

The allegations against Gableman stemmed from his treatment of the mayors of Green Bay and Madison, whom he threatened with jail time during his review, false statements he made during testimony to legislative committees, violating the state’s open records laws, breaching his contract with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and, when OLR began investigating him, “making false statements” to the investigators in an affidavit.

As part of the stipulated agreement, Gableman admitted that “he cannot successfully defend against the allegations of misconduct … and agrees that the allegations of the complaint provide an adequate factual basis in the record.”

In a statement, Law Forward’s general counsel Jeff Mandel said that Gableman’s actions “were and continue to be a threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”

“Our justice system can work only if everyone plays by the rules,” Mandell said. “Two years and one month after Law Forward first filed a grievance with the Office of Lawyer Regulation explaining how Gableman’s unethical behavior did lasting damage to the public’s faith in elections, we are glad to see consequences for those who plan and promote overturning the will of the people.”

“Gableman violated his sworn duty to uphold both the U.S. and the Wisconsin constitutions and his obligations as an attorney,” Mandell continued. “He broke more rules than he followed, acting with complete indifference to election law, procedural norms, and the ethical obligations that bind attorneys. With this deal, Gableman stipulates that he misled courts, lied in public meetings, and violated government transparency laws.”

Reprinted with permission from Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin Examineris part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence.

What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

Is the 2024 MAGA magic fading already?

Don’t bet on it. And yet, Tuesday’s special election results in Wisconsin and Florida were…not terrible for the Democrats.

Let’s start with Wisconsin, where the news is good. Liberal Democrat Susan Crawford pulled out a State Supreme Court win [in a "nonpartisan" election] by a healthy ten points, despite tech billionaire Elon Musk having sunk $25 million of America PAC money into the race. Jill Underly was also re-elected as State Schools Superintendent, defeating education consultant Brittany Kinser by a comfortable five points. Kinser, who was running on the Republican ballot line, described herself during the campaign as a “blue dog Democrat.”

In fact, OpenSecrets identifies Kinser as a consistent Democratic donor. That said, she supports school choice and ran a public charter school network. She outspent Underly more than 2-1, much of the money from the Wisconsin GOP, and I am sure she had nothing to do with the mailers and texts targeting blue districts that falsely identified her as the actual Democrat in the race.

However, our main focus today is Florida, where the Democrats did not win either congressional race, but demonstrated potential Republican weaknesses as we make the turn into 2026.

These two special elections, on opposite sides of the state, were in solid GOP districts: the job was to restore two votes to Speaker Mike Johnson’s whisper-thin Congressional majority. FL-06, in northeast Florida, was vacated by Mike Waltz, who is now Donald Trump’s national security advisor and the genius who let The Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg into the Signal chat. FL-01 is Matt Gaetz’s former seat, which he vacated to become Trump’s attorney general. Except that didn’t work out. Long-suppressed evidence of Gaetz’s bottomless yuckiness finally became public, and even Republican Senators found themselves unable to vote for him as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Democratic Party messaging had held out no hope that either of these seats were winnable, and they weren’t. And yet, here is what I want you to notice. In FL-06, with more than 95 percent of the vote in, State Senator Randy Fine beat Democrat Josh Weil by 14 points. Yet five months earlier, in November 2024, Waltz won the seat by 33 points.

Those 19 points shifting into the Democratic column are, some pundits argue, the victory. But there’s more. Let’s take a look at the county-level margins. Here are Waltz’s numbers from five months ago:

Courtesy of The New York Times


And here are Fine’s margins from Tuesday:

Courtesy of The New York Times

You see disproportionate gaps in two places: Volusia County and St. Johns County, both popular destinations for Canadian snowbirds (these are not birds, but actual people who come to Florida in the winter months.)

Like other Florida property owners, these folks have faced escalating insurance costs and HOA fees, which they are paying with weaker Canadian dollars that will decrease further in value as the Trump tariffs go into effect. Then, as one insurance industry site noted a week before the election, there’s the general Canada-hatred, which has caused Canadians who rent or stay in hotels and resorts to cancel their vacations too.

But, you say, Canadians don’t vote in American elections! Right you are.

However, the many Floridians who rely on snowbird home ownership, rentals and tourism for their own income do vote. And what they are seeing is not good: 25 percent of Florida real estate sales in the past year have been Canadians dumping their property.So, pay attention to that. We may be seeing something similar in FL-O1, where Gaetz trounced Gay Valimont by 32 points in November 2024. His replacement, Florida’s chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, beat Valimont yesterday by less than half of that. Here’s the part that intrigues me: in Escambia, Florida’s most western county, Valimont—who lost to Gaetz by 14 points—beat Patronis by 3 points.

People, 20 points is a lot of ground to make up in five months.

There’s more: according to Tobie Nell Perkins at First Coast News, Escambia has not voted for a Democrat in the last eight gubernatorial cycles, and last voted for a Democratic president in 1960, when it went for John F. Kennedy. This area, anchored by Pensacola, is also a popular snowbird destination. What may be more significant is how heavily military the area is: Pensacola contains over 16,000 active-duty troops, and 7400 civilian employees, an estimated 5-8 percent of whom will get the axe any day now. Greater Pensacola boasts more than 35,000 retired military, contributing to the largest concentration of veterans in any congressional district in the country.

You see where I am going here? During her campaign, Valimont hammered on the cuts to veterans’ services and federal employees. “Trump’s executive orders and the slash-and-burn tactics of billionaire Elon Musk ’s DOGE take aim at federal agencies that serve the region’s veterans,” AP political reporter Kate Payne observed last week; “the faith of some of the district’s conservative voters is being tested.”

Heather Lindsay, a Republican and the mayor of Milton, Florida, in neighboring Santa Rosa County, called the cuts “disastrous,” saying they’re a threat to services that veterans like her brother rely on.

“We have a demonstrated need in this area. And yet they’re going to cut VA services,” Lindsay said in an interview.
Jason Boatwright, a former staffer for Gaetz, said Patronis should be defending the Pensacola VA.“

He needs to stand up and say: ‘You want to make cuts? That’s fine. But don’t do it here. We can’t afford it here,’” Boatwright said.

Lindsay said she doesn’t understand “why more questions haven’t been asked” by Republican leaders like Patronis.

A reliable Republican political consultant I contacted is taking the Escambia results with a grain of salt. Although the GOP had to spend $4 million in FL-06 to beat back Josh Weil, Ryan Girdusky doesn’t see these contests as a referendum on Trump by Republicans, only an energized Democratic one. “I just don’t think people were that engaged,” he told me. “Also, Republicans spent less than $1 million” in FL-01, while Democrats spent $6 million. Republicans “knew it was in the bag so they just didn’t invest in it,” Girdusky explained, and reliably red active-duty military did not make a special election a priority.

So, what have we learned in the last 24 hours?

First, yesterday’s results reinforce what we know: there are Trump voters and there are Republican voters. While the two categories overlap, Trump voters don’t necessarily get off the couch to vote in other elections, even when Elon Musk leaps around the stage in a foam cheese hat handing out checks.

Second, Musk might have been a negative factor in the Wisconsin race, and this is something to watch. As Reid J. Epstein, Julie Bosman, and Emily Cochrane report at the New York Times, the $25 million and massive social media posting Musk invested in the State Supreme Court race did not move the needle—at all. “Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats,” they write about a billionaire whose approval rating took a steep dive the day before the election. “Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.”

In other words, because Elon Musk is tied to Donald Trump, here is the unexpected opportunity. If attacking Donald Trump doesn’t work, attacking his policies does. Elon Musk has become the face of that. So, if this election had accomplished nothing else, it gives Donald Trump a choice: risk failure by sticking with Musk, or dump Musk and risk having ripped the federal government to pieces for no gain whatsoever.

Fourth, Musk’s unpopularity might also have cut GOP margins in Florida. We don’t know whether Florida veterans voted in significant numbers, but we do know that they—and their dependents—are getting it from two directions: the direct DOGE cuts to the Veterans Administration, and the cuts to other federal agencies and services that disproportionately employ veterans.

Finally, despite the high media focus on how much money is being raised and spent, it appears there are limits to how much a sea of money can accomplish. Can billionaires buy elections? Sometimes, and sometimes not. If voters either do not like the candidate, or they do not like the candidate’s high-profile supporters, they’ll take the money—and then run.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie.



Brad Schimel

'Impartial' Wisconsin Supreme Court Nominee Privately Says He'll Support Trump

Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel told a group of canvassers in Waukesha County last weekend that he needs to be elected to provide a “support network” for President Donald Trump and shared complaints about the 2020 election that have been frequently espoused by election deniers.

In a video of the remarks, Schimel is speaking to a group of canvassers associated with Turning Point USA — a right-wing political group that has become increasingly active in Wisconsin’s Republican party.

On the campaign trail, Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican state attorney general, has repeatedly said he is running for the Supreme Court to bring impartiality back to the body. He’s claimed that since the Court’s liberals gained a majority after the 2023 election, it has been legislating from the bench on behalf of the Democratic party.

But in more private events and to more conservative audiences, he’s often spoken more openly about his conservative politics.

At the Turning Point event, he said that prior to the 2024 presidential election, the country “had walked up to edge of the abyss and we could hear the wind howling,” but that the Republican party and its supporters helped the country take “a couple steps back” by electing Donald Trump.

Democrats and their “media allies” still have “bulldozers waiting to push into all that,” he said, by bringing lawsuits to stop Trump’s efforts to dismantle federal agencies without the approval of Congress, end birthright citizenship and fire thousands of federal workers.

“Donald Trump doesn’t do this by himself, there has to be a support network around it,” Schimel said. “They filed over 70 lawsuits against him since he took the oath of office barely a month ago, over 70 lawsuits to try to stop almost every single thing he’s doing because they don’t want him to get a win. They’re so desperate for him to not get a win that they won’t let America have a win. That’s what they’re doing. The only way we’re going to stop that is if the courts stop it. That’s the only place to stop this lawfare.”

When Schimel was the state attorney general, he lobbied the Republican-controlled Legislature to create the position of solicitor general under the state Department of Justice to help him file lawsuits against Democratic policies enacted by then-President Barack Obama. Republicans cut the position after Democrat Josh Kaul defeated Schimel in the 2018 election.

During his time in office Schimel joined a lawsuit with the state of Texas to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional. After the suit was successful in a Texas court, he said, “I’m glad he did this before I left office, because I got one more win before moving on.”

Kaul withdrew the state from the lawsuit after taking office in 2019, and the the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the suit by a 7-2 vote.

But, in his Turning Point remarks, Schimel accused his opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, of participating in the kind of “lawfare” that is being used against Trump now.

“My opponent is an expert on lawfare,” he said, citing her work as a lawyer against the state’s voter ID law and support from liberal billionaire donors.

Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said that Schimel’s comments show he’ll be a “rubber stamp” for the Republican party.

“Brad Schimel’s latest remarks are no surprise, especially coming from someone who’s been caught on his knees begging for money and is bought and paid for by Elon Musk,” Honeyman said. “Schimel is not running to be a fair and impartial member of the Supreme Court, but rather be a rubber-stamp for Musk and a far-right agenda to ban abortion and strip away health care. Schimel has recently been caught behind closed doors saying the Supreme Court ‘screwed’ Trump over by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and these latest remarks are all part of a pattern of extreme and shady behavior from Schimel. Wisconsin deserves a Supreme Court Justice who answers to the people, not the highest bidder.”

Schimel’s campaign has received millions in support from political action committees associated with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has been leading Trump’s effort to slash government programs.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Schimel told a group of supporters in Jefferson County that Trump had been “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it ruled against his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In his remarks in Waukesha, he highlighted a number of talking points popular with many of the state’s most prominent 2020 election deniers. He blamed decisions by the Supreme Court for allowing those issues to persist.

“There were a string of other cases that the Supreme Court refused to hear before the election that impacted the election that year unquestionably,” Schimel said.

Schimel pointed to the issue of special voting deputies in nursing homes as a major problem.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials known as special voting deputies who normally go into nursing homes to help residents cast absentee ballots were unable to enter those facilities.

Republicans have claimed that decision allowed people who should have been ineligible to vote because they’d been declared incompetent to cast a ballot. Conspiracy theorists have pointed to affidavits filed by family members of nursing home residents that their relatives were able to vote. Only a judge can declare someone incompetent to vote, however.

The issue led to the Republican sheriff of Racine County to accuse members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) of committing felony election fraud and became a target in former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely derided review of the 2020 election.

Schimel also blamed the election commission’s decision to exclude the Green Party’s candidates from the ballot that year for Trump’s loss. WEC voted not to allow the party on the ballot because there were errors with the candidate’s addresses on the paperwork. The party sued to have the decision overturned, but the Supreme Court ruled 4-3 against the party because it was too close to the election.

While conservatives held the majority on the Court at the time, Schimel blamed liberals.

“Well, that was with three liberals and a conservative getting soft headed,” Schimel said, referring to Justice Brian Hagedorn, who frequently acted as a swing vote when conservatives controlled the Court.

Schimel added: “Those billionaires from around the country said, ‘What if we could get four liberals on the court? Then we don’t have to fool a conservative into doing something stupid.’ And then they did it in 2023. They bought that election, and they stole the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and they put us in chaos ever since.”

Mike Browne, a spokesperson for progressive political group A Better Wisconsin Together, said Schimel is willing to say anything to curry favor with right-wing supporters and financial backers.

“Brad Schimel has extreme positions like using an 1849 law to try to ban abortion, supporting pardons for violent January 6 insurrectionists, endorsing debunked 2020 election lies, and shilling for Elon Musk,” Browne said. “His bungling attempts to try to talk his way out of it when he gets called out don’t change the fact that time and again we see Brad Schimel on his knees for right-wing campaign cash instead of standing up for Wisconsin or our rights and freedoms.”

The Schimel campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Wisconsin Examiner

Janet Protasiewicz

New Liberal Majority On Wisconsin's Top Court May Mean Big Changes

Judge Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in on Tuesday afternoon as the ninth justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, cementing a five–member liberal majority that could hear major cases on issues such as abortion and gerrymandering, potentially reshaping the legal landscape of the state.

Protasiewicz took the oath of office at the state Capitol rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin. The liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley administered the oath in front of hundreds of observers.

“We all want a Wisconsin where our freedoms are protected; we all want a Wisconsin with a fair and impartial Supreme Court; we all want to live in communities that are safe, and we all want a Wisconsin where everyone is afforded equal justice under the law,” Protasiewicz said. “That’s why I don’t take this responsibility lightly.”

Protasiewicz’s swearing-in marks the end of 15 years of conservative control of the court.

The new majority on the court is predicted to strike down the state’s abortion ban, which was passed in the mid-19th century but was rendered unenforceable for decades by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, and throw out the state’s legislative maps. Critically, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin’s liberal majority will be a bulwark against Republican attempts to limit voting access.

In an election held in April, Protasiewicz, formerly a prosecutor and a Milwaukee County judge, defeated conservative former Justice Daniel Kelly by an 11-point landslide. Protasiewicz’s campaign for the open seat centered on abortion — it said in one of her first campaign ads that she supported “a woman’s freedom to make her own decision on abortion” — and the state’s legislative maps, which she called rigged.

Interest groups and donors were aware of the stakes. During the election, powerful pro- and anti-abortion rights groups broke along ideological lines to support Protasiewicz and Kelly, while labor unions and business groups, political parties, and wealthy in-state and out-of-state donors spent heavily to back their favored candidate. The race between Kelly and Protasiewicz was by far the most expensive state supreme court election in modern history, costing at least $56 million. Even that figure, according to WisPolitics, is likely an undercount.

Voter turnout also broke records. Nearly 2 million Wisconsin residents voted in the election. In the last race for Supreme Court, in 2020, 1.5 million Wisconsinites cast a ballot.

“The election of Janet Protasiewicz changed the balance of power, breaking what has for years been an extreme conservative stranglehold on Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court,” state Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in an email sent to the American Independent Foundation. “This opens the door to a new era of fairness on the court, and this gives us great hope on a number of issues.”

“With a case challenging Wisconsin’s criminal abortion ban already filed and expected to make its way to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, flipping the conservative majority on the court was vital to ensuring our case is given fair consideration,” she added. “Protasiewicz’s presence on the court means abortion could again be available in Wisconsin in the not-so-distant future.”

On June 28, 2022, days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, both Democrats, filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s abortion ban in the Dane County Circuit Court. In July of this year, Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper rejected arguments from state Republicans that the case should be thrown out and allowed the lawsuit to continue.

Also in play are Wisconsin’s legislative maps, which determine how voters are grouped into districts. By strategically creating electoral districts, Republican map drawers have divided voters so as to give the GOP an advantage in the state’s elections for the General Assembly and Senate, a strategy called gerrymandering. Under the current maps, Democrats would have to win by landslide margins to have a chance of securing even a narrow majority in the Assembly.

Right now, despite Democrats having won the last statewide election, Republicans in Wisconsin are two Assembly seats from a supermajority in the Legislature that would allow them to impeach elected state officials and override the governor’s veto.

“If the court were to rule our legislative maps — considered by experts to be the most politically gerrymandered in the nation — unconstitutional, voters could finally have their say in choosing their representatives,” Subeck said. “This comes after more than a decade of unfair maps drawn to ensure a large Republican majority and a decade later redrawn to expand and bake in that majority for another ten years, even as the voters of the state elect Democrats in nearly every statewide election.”

A challenge is already in the works. Subeck noted that Law Forward, a progressive nonprofit law firm, has announced that it plans to file a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s legislative maps later this year.

Law Forward declined to comment for this story.

“I think there’s general agreement that the legal action that will be filed will result in a reopening of the redistricting that occurred … in 2021, and a revisiting of the maps,” Jay Heck, the director of the nonpartisan good government group Common Cause Wisconsin, told the American Independent Foundation in an interview.

Originally, during the 2021 redistricting cycle, the conservative majority on the state Supreme Court selected maps drawn by Evers. However, after Republicans in the Legislature filed an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court, the six-justice conservative majority overturned the state court’s decision. Conservatives on the state Supreme Court then adopted gerrymandered maps that gave Republicans a significant advantage.

Heck said that in their dissent, the three progressive justices “said that those maps were too partisan, that they disenfranchised lots of voters who don’t really have the opportunity to be able to have their votes count as much as someone voting for a Republican because of the way some districts were drawn. And so I would assume that that would be the basis of the lawsuit.”

If the maps are ruled unconstitutional the court could take a variety of steps to replace them, as redistricting fights in other states show. For example, in 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional maps on the grounds that they were gerrymandered and asked the state to provide new, less partisan maps, but then-Gov. Tom Wolf and the state Legislature couldn’t come to an agreement. The court ultimately imposed maps of its own.

Heck said he doesn’t think that the court would draw its own maps, but that it would instead solicit maps from elected officials and make a selection from among them, as the conservative majority on the court did in 2021.

“Evers did a very good job of submitting maps that were less partisan and less Republican-leaning than the maps that the Republican Legislature gave to the Supreme Court, which they accepted and ultimately chose 4-3,” he said. “I think that would be the leading candidate as an alternative.

“Now they might decide to select other maps that are there,” Heck added. “Here’s the thing: Maps can be drawn relatively quickly by lots of different entities. And they may say, Well, we will, in the next month, look at some other maps. And so you can imagine the scrambling that I’m sure is already happening to do that.”

In the 2021 round of redistricting, Common Cause Wisconsin supported the maps drawn by Evers’ office. Heck said that, barring unforeseen circumstances, the group would do the same if the Republican maps were thrown out.

Looking ahead to 2024, Heck said, “I think the state Supreme Court majority will be more kindly towards voting, as opposed to the conservative majority that was less friendly.”

Heck pointed to two decisions handed down by the court’s conservatives: one last year to end the use of ballot drop-boxes and another barring election clerks from adding minor details, such as an omitted zip code, on ballots that would otherwise not be counted. Heck called the rulings “death by a thousand cuts to voting in Wisconsin.”

“Under 30,000 separat[ed] the winner and the loser in four of the six elections for president in Wisconsin since 2000, and that’s out of 3.5, 3.6 million votes cast. So it’s infinitesimal, the separation. So every vote literally does matter here,” Heck said.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

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