Wisconsin Is Corrupt

In 2011/2012, the Wisconsin Club for Growth, its proxy Citizens for a Strong America, and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce collectively spent an estimated $2.47M to reelect Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice David Prosser. They collectively spent another $2.3M to reelect fellow WSC Justice Lewis Gableman. Both are Republicans.

In July 2015, those two honorable men declined to recuse themselves from ruling on the John Doe investigations, which (among other things) are about whether the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce colluded illegally with (Republican) ‘Governor’ Scott Walker’s reelection campaign. Meanwhile, Democratic Justice Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself “because her son works in a law firm that represents one of the people involved in the probe”, according to the JS. JUST PUTTING THAT OUT THERE. 

The justices then reinterpreted campaign finance law prohibiting collusion between campaigns and outside entities, finding that it actually allowed that collusion and everyone else was wrong all along, and ordered that all copies of records that were seized during the investigation must be destroyed. (It's also worth noting that the difference between an ad that says "Vote for David Prosser!" and an ad that says "David Prosser is great and his opponent is an actual gorilla!", i.e. doesn't explicitly say to vote for Prosser, doesn't pass the holy-shit-are-you-kidding-me common-sense test but is somehow enshrined in campaign law. There is no meaningful difference between those two types of ads, yet the law treats them completely differently. That is asinine.)

David Prosser wrote a 15-page opinion on why he declined to recuse himself, which said essentially “Well, that time they spent a huge amount of money to reelect me was four whole years ago—who remembers that far back? Besides, I basically had to accept their money under Wisconsin election rules.” Gableman declined to state his, um, reasoning.

The ‘Governor’ and the Republican-dominated legislature then passed a bill prohibiting John Doe investigations from being used to investigate political corruption.

The two justices voted today, along with the two other Republican justices, that a special prosecutor had been improperly appointed to oversee the investigation into the (maybe illegal) collusion between the aforementioned lobbying groups and the Governor’s campaign arm, and declined to re-hear the case. (To be fair, they did rule that the evidence gathered should be turned over to the court instead of just destroyed.)

Pause for reflection.

HOW COULD ANY REASONABLE PERSON, REGARDLESS OF POLITICAL AFFILIATION, NOT CONSIDER THAT CORRUPTION?

 WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE? A STRING OF HAPPY COINCIDENCES THAT JUST HAPPEN TO WORK OUT IN FAVOR OF THE PARTY THAT DOMINATES ALL THREE BRANCHES OF STATE GOVERNMENT, AND PROTECTS SAID DOMINANT PARTY FROM ANY LEGAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND EVEN EXPANDS THEIR POWER?

Prosser whines about campaign finance law in his opinion and says that it wouldn’t be fair if he didn’t take the money. He’s the one who decides whether to recuse himself, and he believes he can be impartial, so we should take his word for it. Besides, four years is a long time.

That is legal. It is also insane.

 No legal system should allow ANY group to spend a huge amount of money to elect a judge, then allow that judge to make a ruling about that group. How could that not at least appear to be corrupt? And isn't preventing the appearance of corruption almost as important as preventing actual corruption (Buckley vs. Valeo)?

Partisan witch hunt, my ass. This would be dirty if ANYONE did it.

Imagine this situation with a Democratic governor and a Democratic court (in some bizarre parallel universe) with a special prosecutor trying to prove that the Democratic governor colluded improperly with Big Solar and Big Wind to get himself reelected (where a previous investigation has already convicted six of his employees). And then when they try to prove it in court, the Dem-controlled court reinterprets existing law so that it's against their suit, and orders that all evidence collected be destroyed. When the prosecutor protests that Big Solar and Big Wind spent heavily to elect two of the Dem justices, the Dem justices look themselves over real hard and say “Nope, no corruption here”. And the Dem governor says “This is clearly a partisan witch hunt.” And then, oh yeah, he goes to the Dem-controlled legislature (where Dems have a gerrymandered 2/3 majority, despite the state going R in the last seven Presidential elections, most recently by nearly 7%) and passes a law that makes it harder to investigate cases of political corruption. And then oh yeah, he then guts the Government Accountability Board, which had been pushing for accountability in government, and rewrites campaign finance law in favor of groups like Big Wind and Big Solar. (Those have not been passed yet, but they’re about to be.)

If you’re a proud Republican voter, don’t you scream bloody murder at that scenario?

And if you’re a principled Democratic voter, aren’t you right there alongside them?

Well, it’s happening in Wisconsin, and Democrats are on the losing end. Screaming impotently.

Where are the principled Republicans?