Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler on November 13, 2024 (Image: wicourts.gov)
Elections have consequences, and on Tuesday, Slate reports the liberal majority Wisconsin Supreme Court took a major step in striking down the state’s Republican gerrymandered map that disenfranchises Democratic voters.
The majority appointed a pair of three-judge panels to decide whether the map violates the state constitution and if the judiciary must impose a fairer substitute,” reports Slate's Mark Joseph Stern. But their decision drew dissent from the court’s conservative members, who used to hold a majority before frustrated Wisconsin voters installed a new liberal justice in a special election earlier this year.
Conservative Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler — now in the minority — argued that the use of a more balanced map would violate the U.S. Constitution. She cited a 2022 Supreme Court decision, Moore v. Harper, for the proposition that state courts’ role in congressional redistricting is “exceedingly limited.”
“There is just one problem,” said Stern. “Moore said no such thing. That quotation appears nowhere in the ruling. To the contrary, Moore held the opposite, concluding that state courts can play a legitimate, meaningful role in congressional redistricting.”
Wisconsin’s congressional map has long been in the crosshairs of voting rights advocates, who pushed a grassroots campaign against billionaire Elon Musk’s attempt to buy a conservative majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court special election earlier this year.
Musk landed a ‘blowout’ loss, however, and Democrats took the court majority by a 4-3 lead with the win of liberal judicial candidate Susan Crawford.
“The state’s electorate is split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Yet in 2024, it elected six Republicans and just two Democrats to the House of Representatives,” said Stern. “This 6–2 split is a product of a notorious gerrymander that Republicans drew after the 2010 census.”
Wisconsin’s new hard-fought, 4–3 liberal majority in the high court has already struck down the state’s legislative map, which was an egregious Republican gerrymander. Now two groups of plaintiffs are targeting the equally Republican-biased congressional map.
“If their lawsuit prevails, Democrats could gain up to three seats in the House of Representatives,” said Stern.
“It is not clear how Ziegler’s misquotation wound up in the published opinion of a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. By Wednesday morning, the court had withdrawn the opinion from its website and replaced it with a partial correction — without publicly acknowledging the mistake,” said Stern. “Yet this new version doubles down on the first draft’s underlying error: It continues to assert that SCOTUS severely restricted state courts’ oversight of congressional redistricting, offering a patently inaccurate summary of Moore’s holding. To justify her hostility toward judicial redistricting, Ziegler resorted to a make-believe version of the law.”
“Mistakes happen,” Stern continued. “But when they do, judges are supposed to fix them, not recast them into a doctrine that doesn’t exist.”
Read the Slate report at this link.
