Judicial Ethics at Work in Wisconsin

Progressives spent big to elect Justice Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and they’re wasting no time trying to cash in now that the court has a 4-3 liberal majority. Ms. Protasiewicz was sworn in Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday liberal groups filed a challenge to the state’s legislative maps.

Groups including Law Forward, the Election Law Clinic at Harvard and the Campaign Legal Center say the Wisconsin maps are an illegal gerrymander giving the state more legislative districts that lean Republican than Democrat. Their petition notes as evidence that even though Democrats have “won as much as 53% of the statewide vote,” they have only held about 40% of state Assembly seats.

In reality, Wisconsin’s maps break down the way they do mainly because the state’s Democrats are highly concentrated in the urban areas of Milwaukee and Madison, with the rest of the state mostly conservative. Wisconsin law specifies that all political districts must have the same number of voters. Each must be contiguous and compact and preserve counties and municipalities when possible.

The progressive groups charge that the map has some geographic gaps, but the current lines were approved by the state Supreme Court in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Governor Tony Evers’s maps as an illegal racial gerrymander.

That didn’t stop Justice Protasiewicz from signaling to progressives that she will vote their way. During a campaign event in January, candidate Protasiewicz said the maps are “rigged” and that “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair.”

“I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case,” she added, “but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

The Wisconsin Code of Judicial Ethics “prohibits a candidate for judicial office from making statements that commit the candidate regarding cases, controversies or issues likely to come before the court.” Justice Protasiewicz’s statements on the legislative maps mean she has clearly prejudged the case under Wisconsin’s judicial code.

Democrats in Congress have proposed stringent and misguided standards for U.S. Supreme Court Justices to recuse themselves from cases. But since they’re insisting, we await word from Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse on Justice Protasiewicz’s ethical duty to recuse herself.