… would require sequestering every voter!

Like Captain Louis Reynault, the usual good government goo-goos are appalled — APPALLED! — that politics is going on in Wisconsin’s high-stakes supreme court campaign.

Cutting to the chase, a certain former mayor pragmatically calls the Spring election, “a choice between two partisan hacks. Janet Protasiewicz is the Democrat and Dan Kelly is the Republican in this ostensibly nonpartisan contest.” 

Indeed, Protasiewicz is running on a political platform that would make Bernie Sanders blush: abolish Act 10, legalize abortion up to birth, and redraw legislative district maps. For starters. Thus outflanked, the goo-goos propose throwing up a non-partisan or bi-partisan commission to appoint justices on MERIT. Bipartisan — like the dysfunctional Wisconsin Elections Commission? (!!!)

Only they’re careful about using the term “merit,” it having taken on a decidedly disproportionate, inEquitable and unWoke connotation.

Some precedent for you, Chollie

Enter Charlie Sykes. Charlie used to be Republican kingmaker when he ruled the airwaves at WTMJ radio out of Milwaukee. Blaska appeared on his show several times. But he went never-Tr•mp at the 2016 national convention in Cleveland. So did many of us but Charlie went over the wall and into the embrace of Rachel Maddow at MSNBC.

At his new stand, Charlie performs a “Requiem for the independent judiciary.” (Does Anthony Quinn play in it?) Now a full-fledged progressive partisan, Charlie goes after Kelly, not Protasiewicz. Kelly gets clobbered for saying: “A redistricting map is an entirely political act. It involves political calculation. It involves communities of interest. It involves give and take. It involves compromise. It involves the political process. It is political, from start to end.”

Problem for Charlie is that Dan Kelly has the law on his side. Redistricting IS political. In Gill v. Whitford 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Wisconsin’s legislative maps to stand. Writing in Rucho v. Common Cause 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded:

“Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

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The Rucho v. Common Cause case summary observes that:

“Partisan gerrymandering was known in the Colonies prior to Independence … Aware of electoral districting problems, the Framers … assign[ed] the issue to the state legislatures, expressly checked and balanced by the Federal Congress, with no suggestion that the federal courts had a role to play.” 

While upholding one-person, one vote, “It hardly follows from that principle that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation commensurate to its share of statewide support,”Justice Roberts continued. Partisan support, after all, is evanescent. Republicans like Carroll Metzner and Robert O. Uehling represented the west side of Madison up to the mid 1960s. 

Roberts feared “an unprecedented expansion of judicial power” would require the courts to intervene “over and over again around the country with each new round of districting, for state as well as federal representatives.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: prefers the State of Wisconsin adopt the federal template: the governor nominates and the legislature confirm justices. Still political, but without the millions of dollars in air wars. Regardless, a 10-year term can make for independence. Just ask Brian Hagedorn.

How non-partisan is Ann Walsh Bradley?