Our Politicized State Supreme Court
Wisconsin is developing a wonderful new tradition. After years of letting powerful conservative elites buy Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCOWI) seats for rabid right-wing ideologues, Wisconsin voters wised up and started electing actual legal professionals who are—not coincidentally—liberal. Starting decades ago laws, courts, and legal debates across the US have first drifted, then violently flung far to the right of what The Constitution and the law actually say. As a result, anyone who genuinely gives a shit about the rule of law is going to lean liberal.
Since 2015, Wisconsin voters seem to have gained this understanding and elected liberals in five out of seven SCOWI races, winning by 10-16% margins each time. The next iteration of this tradition is happening this spring, and we’re hoping the pattern continues, bringing us a 5-2 liberal majority on the court.
Justice Rebecca Bradley’s seat is up for grabs because, in a rare turn of events, she is not running to defend it. One of the only two times conservatives won recent races was the last time Bradley’s seat was up in 2016. Bradley is corrupt and conservative, but with her incumbent advantage and by spending more than twice her opponent, she secured a narrow victory. Last spring, Bradley said she would run again, despite not raising any money. Then in August, she dropped out.
Bradley’s withdrawal offered conservatives an opportunity to break their losing streak. They could have backed a serious, reasonable candidate, someone who has a shred of credibility when they claim to rule impartially and respect the law. They’re not. The 2019 race offers insight here. That year, conservative Brian Hagedorn narrowly won, even though liberals out-spent him. Hagedorn is certainly a conservative, but in office he has occasionally tempered his extremism. Bradley or either of the dim, angry, right-wing losers in the 2025, 2023, and 2020 races seem unlikely to do the same. Of course, conservatives responded to Hagedorn’s occasional impartiality with hate and death threats. Running an actually impartial, credible candidate with a shot at winning would be even more intolerable to them.
So, instead, they’re backing Maria Lazar. She, like Bradly, combines conservatism with corruption, but still calls herself independent and impartial. Meanwhile, liberals are backing Chris Taylor, a Madison area legislator, then judge, with a history of defending abortion rights and other constitutional protections. Republicans and conservative pundits are shitting their pants about Taylor’s “radical agenda”. This tired playbook where they talk endlessly and piously about impartiality and rule of law has not been working for conservatives. Most people know they are the less objective, more ideologically-driven choice. It’s been obvious for over a decade. In this time of Republican war crimes, ICE lawlessness, absurd immunity, and shadow docket shenanigans, conservatives claiming impartiality has gone from suspicious to totally laughable. Taylor will almost certainly whoop Lazar as a result.
Taylor is also outpacing the extreme fundraising of the last two cycles. This is concerning because, as we described recently, it leads people to the false conclusion that liberal victories depend upon huge donations from the rich. Countering conservative spending on SCOWI races surely helped, but it is important to remember that votes, not money, win races. However much money was spent, the liberal streak on Wisconsin’s highest court is primarily a result of educated, motivated voters and volunteers responding to conservative overreach.
Cowards on the court
The remaining question is: how much does a liberal majority matter? In the last two elections, Wisconsin overwhelmingly preferred the liberal SCOWI candidates, helping secure those 10% plus victories. We gave the highest court in the state a mandate to fix Wisconsin’s broken democracy. They are letting us down.
Our first example is Act 10. This unconstitutional union-busting law was passed sneakily in the dead of night, provoked massive protests, and sparked a recall effort against its signer. Act 10 should have been revoked as soon as it passed, but at the time, the court was packed full of crooked conservatives. Since then, voters ran those conservatives off, but their bad ideas and precedents linger because the liberals we elected lack the courage to overturn bad precedent, or the honesty to admit the court has been politicized. Last summer, a Dane County Judge declared Act 10 unconstitutional, but the Republican legislature is appealing the decision, and SCOWI refuses to expedite the appeal, prolonging the injustice of this widely hated law.
Even worse, Wisconsin’s liberal Supreme Court justices are currently helping Trump’s MAGA party in the 2026 midterm. We fought for and trusted them to restore Wisconsin’s democracy, but they are refusing to fix our gerrymandered congressional maps. Extreme gerrymandering has been Wisconsin’s bane and Republican’s source of power since 2010. In 2023, electing Protasiewicz showed Robin Vos that his best option was compromise. Unfortunately, our weak, disappointing Governor Tony Evers helped him secure maps that still skew to Republicans’ favor. Evers’ betrayal is now hampering the fight to restore democracy in the state legislature. Meanwhile, our congressional maps were left untouched. Wisconsin has 8 congressional districts, and voters tend to split at or near 50% on every race, but the maps are so fucked up that the Congressional delegation holds steady at 6 Republicans and 2 Democrats.
People have filed multiple lawsuits to repeal those maps and fix them. Even after voters kicked biased conservatives off the court, SCOWI declined to hear those lawsuits without explanation. They are currently, finally hearing two new lawsuits, but because they blew off prior cases and chose a long, slow process, Wisconsin likely won’t have new maps until after the 2026 midterm. Meanwhile, conservative opponents of fair democratic processes are screaming about how any move by SCOWI to make fair maps is politically motivated, even as Trump is squeezing every Republican controlled state legislature he can to try (and sometimes fail) to make them gerrymander more safe districts for him.
Anyone who knows eight divided by two is four can see that Wisconsin’s maps are gerrymandered. The lawsuits also detail why in a variety of compelling legal arguments, which SCOWI mostly refuses to hear. As with the US Supreme Court’s shadow docket, they refuse to even explain why. Like Joe Biden and Merick Garland refusing to aggressively investigate Trump after January 6, these liberal justices seem to be listening to bad faith arguments from conservative critics. This is a classic “can’t be neutral on a moving train” situation. The fear of being accused of politicizing the courts leads the liberal justices to make highly political decisions favoring Republican congresspeople. This failure not only deprives voters of meaningful representation, it could enable Trump’s final moves to secure a permanent dictatorship.
