On April 5th there is a General Election for Wisconin Supreme Court. I diaried about it yesterday. We've got 35 days to make up 30 percentage points. Both candidates have accepted public funding so we're going to have to combat the Citizens United groups by word of mouth and the internet. The primary was on February 15th and the top two candidates advanced to the general. We need to get the word out in a big way or the incumbent right wing tool Justice Prosser will skate under the radar to an easy victory. Wisconsinites that sat out the November election need to get off their asses on APRIL 5TH and vote for JOANNE KLOPPENBURG for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice. It's a 10 year gig and Walker's budget fix might just end up before the court.
THERE IS NOT ANOTHER MORE IMPORTANT ELECTION IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW THAN THIS ONE!!
Walker's old job, Milwaukee County Executive, is on the ballot the same day and is almost as important but that's not statewide. The candidate of choice is Chris Abele and per Puddytat in the comments:
(Everyone) in Milwaukee County needs to support Chris Abele for County Executive (Walkers old job). Stone is a heavily financed RW candidate who will stop at nothing to get the job. I expect RW astroturf attack ads to start anytime soon.
We cannot allow RW funded smear campaigns to steal any more seats in the Wisconsin Supreme Court or Walker to be able to chalk up getting his pal into his old job to continue his horrendous policies.
BIG WINS in these elections will send a message that will reverberate all over Wisconsin and all around the country.
The time has come again to GOTV!!!
Prosser's margin over Kloppenburg was 123,216 votes, but his margin over all three opposition candidates combined was only 40,254 votes. If we can harness the grass roots energy of the Madison protests we could flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court and take at least one branch of the government back from the right wingers. Prosser was one (there are 7 total) of the 4 Justices that ruled they could hear cases involving their own campaign contributers. This is a BIG F*ING DEAL!
Yesterday I wrote:
The upcoming Supreme Court election is more important than ever in light of the fact that Milwaukee City Attorney Grant F. Langley questions the constitutionality of Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reports:
The constitutionality of proposed changes in Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair bill that would require pension fund contributions from public employees, including members of the city of Milwaukee Employees Retirement System, was questioned in an opinion released Monday by Milwaukee City Attorney Grant Langley.
(snip)
In a letter to Walker, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett requested that State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen review the opinion and provide Barrett with an assurance that Walker's office and state legislative drafters reviewed those issues during the drafting process of Walker's bill.
Another reason this is a Big F*ing Deal is that as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal notes:
A candidate for the state's high court (Kloppenburg) is taking a swing at the campaign of Justice David Prosser for saying he would serve as a complement to Republicans who will run the governor's office and Legislature next year.
"For a sitting judge to promise that he will work to further the ends of the other two branches of government shows an enormous disregard for the separation of powers and the role of the court as an independent, impartial body that ought to promise just one thing: to decide cases on the law and the facts brought forth in those cases," said a statement released Thursday by Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg.
(snip)
Kloppenburg was responding to a news release issued Wednesday by Prosser's campaign announcing he had hired Brian Nemoir as his campaign director.
Nemoir was quoted in that release as saying: "Our campaign efforts will include building an organization that will return Justice Prosser to the bench, protecting the conservative judicial majority and acting as a common sense complement to both the new administration and Legislature."
In addition, the Wisconsin State Journal has a tidbit you should know about the Wisconsin Supreme Court:
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and two others seen as the court's liberal bloc said Gableman knowingly made a false statement suggesting his opponent helped free a sex offender who went on to rape again. They said a judicial panel wrongly recommended dismissing the case, and directed the Wisconsin Judicial Commission to seek a jury trial.
Three justices seen as Gableman's conservative colleagues said the ad was distasteful, but the words themselves were "objectively true." They ruled Gableman's speech was protected by the First Amendment and directed the commission to dismiss its complaint.
And to top it all off, if you were unaware, the Brenner Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law says:
Several petitions on recusal came before the Wisconsin high court over the past year, each proposing different rules for how and when state Supreme Court justices should be disqualified from hearing cases involving conflicts of interest.In a controversial 4-3 decision in October, the court rejected two promising petitions, and instead voted to grant two petitions that flouted the spirit – if not the very letter – of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2009 ruling in 'Caperton v. Massey. Caperton held that the constitution’s due process clause prohibits a judge from hearing the case of a party who spent substantial funds to place the judge on the bench. Under the rules adopted by the Wisconsin justices in October, though, no amount of campaign spending – whether in the form of direct contributions or independent expenditures – could be the lone basis for a judge’s recusal.
The Supreme Court of Wisconsin voted to adopt the misguided rules in October by a razor-thin 4-3 vote. The court’s two newest members – Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, who formed half of the four-justice majority in favor of the rules – are the recent beneficiaries of exorbitant campaign spending by the very group that wrote one of the petitions adopted by the court, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC). (Ziegler and Gableman each bear scars from recent dust-ups of their own, Ziegler for repeatedly failing to recuse from cases involving financial conflicts and Gableman for campaign ads he ran in 2008 that resulted in ethics charges.) Then, in December, the court had to withdraw its October vote when it became clear that there were details that still needed reconciling between the two petitions the majority had adopted verbatim.
Because JoAnne Kloppenburg has accepted public financing the only way we can support her financially is through The Democratic Party of Wisconsin.Updated by PvtJarHead at Mon Mar 7, 2011, 08:15:13 PM
I discovered this morning that I've misspelled our candidate's name in this diary. Her first name ends with an "e", it is JoAnne. I will correct the diary at my next opportunity.