When Janet Protasiewicz ran for a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, she campaigned on an explicit promise to reconsider the state's egregiously gerrymandered legislative map. Voters approved and swept her into office by a wide margin.
This gave Democrats a majority on the court, which means there's a chance of drawing fair districts after years of Republican abuse. Naturally this has infuriated Republicans in the legislature, who are now threatening to impeach Protasiewicz. This would be nothing more than blather except for one thing: Republicans hold a supermajority in the state Senate and might actually be able to pull it off.
How is it possible for Republicans to have such a huge majority in a state that elected a Democratic governor in 2018; voted for Joe Biden in 2020; and overwhelmingly chose a Democrat for the Supreme Court just a couple of months ago? That's easy: state Senate districts are wildly gerrymandered.
It's the circle of life. Gerrymandering gives you the power to keep everything gerrymandered. End the gerrymander, and you lose the power to gerrymander. Funny how that works.
Republicans have only been in favor of democracy as long as it produces the ideological outcomes they prefer. If democracy doesn't produce those outcomes, well, you have to get rid of democracy. See too the right's attempts to sabotage the ballot proposition measure on abortion in Ohio, stymie voting rights well, almost anywhere they can, overturn referendums to expand Medicaid that pass by wide margins, etc..
The Wisconsin GOP have adopted Brecht's "solution" in earnest:
Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
+1
California has had experience with that "Republican supermajority" thing, when the legislature voted that taxes could only be increased by a supermajority vote. Prop something or other.
It's something a losing party would implement.
If it was a proposition then it wasn’t the legislature voting it in but the electorate.
Thanks for the reminder! Sorry!
Proposition 13 in 1978(?). It broke the state's finances for decades.
Calling this Gerrymandering is really underselling it. This is aggressively undemocratic.
There is another name for it.
Dan Knodl, the marginal GOP supermajority vote, won a GOP +11 state senate district by less than a point, in one of the suburban districts where the Democrats are chewing away at baked-in GOP advantages.
Since gerrymanders dilute the gerrymandering party's votes while concentrating their opponents' votes, there is an inbuilt vulnerabilty: What happens when a wave election overwhelms the lower-margin districts of the GOP?
It won't take much more anger on abortion to boost D turnout and mute GOP turnout past the point of gerrymander collapse, where the GOP is relegated to the Deliverance districts only.
I suspect the GOP understands this, and does not care.
Now that's why God made voter suppression tools...
People keep voting wrong. Obstinately. Repeatedly. Unrepentently.
Democracy was never meant to function under those conditions.
Somebody had to do something.
Gerrymander collapse. I like the way you think. Probably in 2024 Wisconsin state Senate will lose their supermajority.
Is this referencing colony collapse?
Colony collapse and bye bye bees. No more peaches, pears, nectarines, etc.
Gerrymander collapse and bye bye far right Christianist crapolla. At least I hope so, and we can still have stone fruit.
Slightly OT:
You know how Republicans keep claiming that Democrats are committing vote fraud?
-- An attorney in Washington had his law license suspended for a year for filing frivolous lawsuits. I guess they still keep looking for fraud in all the wrong political parties, because...
-- This past May, three Republican officials in Rensselaer County (NY) were indicted on federal charges of ballot irregularities and two others pled guilty.
-- An Ohio MAGA was convicted of voter fraud, having voted for years in two jurisdictions.
-- And today an Alabama state Republican representative was arrested for voter fraud -- living in one district but ran for election in a different district.
The hysterical part is that one of the GOP legislators pushing impeachment stated that it isn't gerrymandering which has resulted in the GOP super majority, it is the quality of their candidates. However if that really is the case, eliminating gerrymandering wouldn't make any difference. I know expecting honesty and logic from the modern GOP is a fool's errand, but you would have hoped that a half way sentient journalist would have picked up on that and asked the obvious followup question but, of course, that never happens either.
"When Janet Protasiewicz ran for a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, she campaigned on an explicit promise to reconsider the state's egregiously gerrymandered legislative map. Voters approved and swept her into office by a wide margin."
Judges are supposed to recuse themselves from hearing cases if their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Somehow I doubt she is planning to do this.
So she was supposed to hide her opinion from the voters?
This supposition is simply unworkable for issues on which the voters may vote, and it is just stupid to keep coming back to it.
It worked for Clarence Thomas. During the hearings on his appointment to the Supreme Court he told the Senate he had never thought about the legality of abortion. Toss up whether they should have rejected him for abject ignorance or perjury.
Thomas is not elected. Janet Protasiewicz is. The voters have a right to know what her opinion is on all of the important issues. Too bad the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't have to run for election.
In what way is her impartiality reasonably under question?
Exactly. But it only applies to Democrats.
/s
There in lies the problem with electing judges, it makes them creatures of politics. Voters expect them to keep their promises, so recusing oneself from that which they ran upon would be a broken promise.
Okaaay. Tell me, how does 'an explicit promise to reconsider the state's egregiously gerrymandered legislative map' make her less than impatrial? Because I sure don't see the connection you think is so obvious here.
If they did that what would happen, a special election where all the people who voted for her the first time will vote her right back in?
If she got impeached and convicted, she may be precluded from holding an elected office.
Conservatives think anything they can imagine is not just plausible but likely.
Conversely, anything they can't imagine -- and they're some of the most unimaginative people in the world -- is impossible.